UCSD-Embajadores Community Station | Santuario Frontera

The UCSD Community Stations are an experiment in urban co-development between UC San Diego and grassroots organizations at the margins of our border region. Distributed on both sides of the wall, the UCSD Community Stations are a network of civic spaces in vulnerable border neighborhoods, richly programmed for cross-border dialogue, collaborative research, urban pedagogy, participatory design, and cultural production.

Each station is designed, funded, built and programmed between UCSD and a community-based organization. The Community Stations present a new model of urban co-development in which the economic power of our public university becomes leverage for our community partners to develop their own housing, public space, climate adaptation, conservancy initiatives and vibrant educational and cultural programming designed to increase public knowledge and collective action. We have built four Community Stations, two in San Diego and two in Tijuana.

On the Tijuana side, we work in the Laureles Canyon, an informal settlement adjacent
to the border wall at the western periphery of the city, home now to 100,000 people.
Thousands of global migrants have arrived here in the last years. One of our Community Stations is located in the most polluted sub-basin of this canyon, a precarious environment that powerfully illustrates the dramatic proximity of wealth and poverty in our bioregion.

The UCSD-Embajadores Community Station is co-developed with Embajadores de Jesús to rethink migrant housing as a flexible, social infrastructure, to support incremental live-work configurations. The project has now become the largest refugee sanctuary in the entire US–Mexico border region. It has grown into a full-on “sanctuary neighborhood”, modeling an essential alternative to both conventional camps, which are ephemeral and focused primarily on increasing temporary housing capacity, to a more holistic model that prioritizes longer-term habitation, social inclusion, workforce development and environmental stewardship.