Places We Love San Diego Tijuana

The making-of a cross-border city guide built by crowdsourcing beloved places from hundreds of people across San Diego and Tijuana. A small, warm illustration of the SDF's Partners component — a book that exists because one collaboration kept leading to the next. Megan Groth, an architect, urbanist and educator who lectures in Architecture at the University of San Diego, modelled the project on a photo guidebook she found in Helsinki during that city's year as World Design Capital in 2012. The idea sat until San Diego and Tijuana were jointly named World Design Capital 2024, when Groth began the book in earnest. The finished work is a bilingual, 272-page guide of photography and essays by local writers, designers and photographers, built as advocacy for better urban design as much as a guidebook, and, by Groth's own account, one of the few books to show San Diego and Tijuana as the single binational region so many people actually live in.