Critical intervention into the urban field requires first recognizing the contested spatial and institutional power dynamics that drive today’s urban and bio-regional crises. The 2026 Lyceum Fellowship competition asks participants to first expose and visualize a particular conflict—reflecting on the requisite political, economic, social, and spatial processes—then design the conditions to tackle this conflict.

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Program Authors and Jury Chairs: Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman

Critical Context: Urban Conflict is Our Creative Tool

The conceptual framework for the 2026 Lyceum Fellowship competition emerges  from our own research-based practice, embedded at the San Diego-Tijuana  border. This border region is a microcosm of the many injustices and indignities  faced by people across the world. This geography of conflict has been our  ground zero, to explore new social-spatial strategies of inter-dependence, from  which to confront the major challenges of urbanization today: Deepening social-economic inequality, the dramatic migration of peoples across the hemispheres,  compounded by the impacts of climate disruption on cities and biodiversity,  border building everywhere and the current destruction of a public imagination.

We believe that critical intervention into the urban field requires first recognizing  the contested spatial and institutional power dynamics that drive today’s urban  and bioregional crises. In other words, without visualizing the conditions that have  produced the crisis, how can we tackle it?

Exposing this often-missing information enables us to piece together a more  accurate, anticipatory urban research and design intervention. In other words,  the conditions themselves that have produced these crises must be our materials  for design, making urban conflict the most important creative tool to reimagine  the city today—a platform from which to develop more equitable and just policy  proposals and spatial strategies. We are interested in exposing, visualizing and  engaging urban conflict as the generative context from which to problematize the  relationship between the social and the spatial, the political and the aesthetic.

If you won a $15,000 grant for three months of travel abroad,   where would you go and why?

ABOUT THE LYCEUM FELLOWSHIP  For four decades, the Lyceum Fellowship has conducted annual architectural  design competitions for students, partnering with highly noted architects from  all areas of the field to develop our competition program briefs.

The Lyceum  was established in 1985 by Jon McKee, AIA (1927-2013). We have awarded more  than half a million dollars in travel grants to date, enriching the education of  highly talented students through travel to more than 110 countries. In 2015, the  American Institute of Architects recognized the Lyceum with its prestigious  AIA Collaborative Achievement Award in acknowledgment of the Lyceum’s  mission and legacy.

Visit Lyceum Fellowship.org to download the brief today.