San Diego, together with Tijuana, has placed a bid to be designated the 2024 World Design Capital, a selection that will be finalized this October.
Selected every two years, the World Design Capital involves a year-long promotion program that showcases the accomplishments of cities that effectively incorporate design across their economic, technological, social, cultural, political, and environmental sectors.
To date, no U.S. city has held this distinction, initiated in 2008 by the World Design Organization based in Montreal, Canada. Nor has the title ever been granted to a binational region.
Currently, it is held by the French city of Lille, and it moves to Valencia, Spain in 2022.
A San Diego nonprofit called the Design Forward Alliance was created with the help of numerous community and design groups to coordinate with Tijuana representatives and prepare the bid package.
Michèle Morris, president of the Design Forward Alliance, is very optimistic about this region’s chances for success.
“We do feel confident that we will make the short list,” she says. Morris also is associate director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego, which helped launch the alliance in 2016 following an inaugural Design Forward Summit in downtown San Diego.
Win or lose, Morris notes that the bidding process has strengthened ties and fostered new creative ideas for our region.
Up to three city finalists are expected to be named in coming weeks, said Jessica Hanson, a World Design Organization program manager. Then the WDO — pandemic and travel restrictions permitting — will dispatch a jury of members of its 2024 organizing committee to personally evaluate the finalist cities and their proposals.
If it earns the title, the San Diego region would benefit from the exposure in multiple ways. With it come seven signature events, including a signing ceremony and a closing celebration. In between are a street festival kick-off, an event highlighting the winning city, an urban design policy conference, a seven-day international design showcase and a networking meeting involving previous design capital cities.
A preliminary analysis by a UC San Diego Extension researcher projects winning the designation would generate 4 million visitors and 1.4 million overnight stays.
The bid put forth by the Design Forward Alliance focuses on several legacy and community-based projects, including rebuilding Friendship Park at the San Diego/Tijuana border, planning future projects for Balboa Park and crafting design-oriented responses to homelessness as well as other efforts to promote equity and social justice.
Design is viewed as much more than colorful graphics and artistic architecture. The alliance aims to integrate design into all aspects of life — threading it through our communities, businesses and government. A key goal is to appoint a chief design officer in both San Diego and Tijuana.
This 2024 proposal differs from those made by previous WDC cities, which were generally government-funded appeals, Morris notes. “Ours is the community partnering with the city and county governments,” she says. “The city (of San Diego) endorses the initiative, but it’s not putting forth the funds.”
The World Design Organization, formerly known as the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, founded in 1957, has grown to include more than 170 member groups around the world. It doesn’t publicize competing bidders, but Moscow and Frankfurt, Germany, are said to be among them.
Volunteers contributed much of the work for San Diego’s bid committee, chaired by MaeLin Levine. The alliance also secured backing from corporate sponsors, donations and a GoFundMe campaign that raised about $18,000.
The result was a detailed, multi-page proposal and narrated video posted on the alliance website, home2024.com .
San Diego’s shared border with Mexico presented an intriguing prospect. “We decided we were going to submit binationally,” Morris says.
Malin Burnham, whose Burnham Center for Community Advancement is a project backer, pointed to U.S. cross-border access to the airport in Tijuana. “The two terminals from one side of the border to the other are connected by a bridge,” he said on the video. “This is the only place in the world that this has been done.”
“We believe that the potential of economic impact is huge,” notes Laura Araujo, director of binational affairs at Tijuana Innovadora. “This event will do for design in our region what the culinary arts have already achieved.”
In addition to the economic impact, Araujo sees it as an opportunity to work together on a common goal. “So we believe that this designation will help San Diego and Tijuana establish a closer relationship. And it will help to define a new era of cooperation and growth.”
Organizers view this as a crucial period for enhancing cross-border interaction, especially in these times where immigration, homelessness and social injustice are such hot topics.
When the alliance received formal notice last month that its bid was accepted for evaluation, it was viewed as tacit approval of the proposed binational scope.
However, details of many innovative concepts still have to be worked out. “We have lots of ideas and lots of stakeholders,” says Morris. “A lot will be done before designation and 2024 come around.”
Source: San Diego Union-Tribune