About the Project

In its original format, Re/Generation Barrio Logan is a place-based mobile-app walking tour. It explores an alternative narrative to gentrification based on a 7-year study of urban development in San Diego’s Barrio Logan. Triggered by the decade-old Petco Park Baseball Stadium, ballpark encroachment has transformed the barrio into a hip industrial arts district.

For over a hundred years, the barrio has experienced destructive changes in land use as a result of unjust city zoning. However, a history of racialization coupled with the Chicano arts movement has made the Barrio Logan into a rich cultural landscape. As the neighborhood is once again threatened by displacement, the community is eager to hold on to the place they have made their own.

Today, local residents mobilize to fight against the usual displacement caused by urban development, in favor for urban change to benefit the community. This project captures this phenomenon through photography and recorded conversations to investigate both the transitions and continuities of a community that refuses to be dismantled by outside forces.