As a kid growing up in Rancho Santa Fe, Megan Groth’s parents routinely took the family hiking in the desert, or to Ramona, Santa Ysabel, or to the beach in Encinitas, and to local historic sites. She grew familiar with North County and the backcountry, but after moving away for a while, she realized it would help to get reacquainted with her hometown region.
“I left for college and didn’t come back until 2018, and I came back as a mother to a young child and I just didn’t know where to go or what to do,” she says. “Then, the pandemic started, so this project was…kind of a way for me to reintroduce myself to this city and to really understand it as an architect and as an urbanist, and, quite frankly, as a mother.”
Groth is a lecturer in architecture at the University of San Diego and the author of “Places We Love: San Diego Tijuana,” a photo guidebook on public spaces in San Diego County and Tijuana. She’ll talk about her book — and how the collaboration with a co-founder at Raygun, along with local writers and photographers, came together over 10 months to complete it — at 7 tonight at The Book Catapult, 3010-B Juniper St., San Diego.
The inspiration for “Places We Love” came from her time in Helsinki in 2012 during their World Design Capital project. She noticed a small Helsinki guidebook in a gift shop. It didn’t cost a lot of money, it was paperback and small enough to fit in a bag, but it was pretty nontraditional in of how she’d previously experienced a guidebook. For a picture of one of their major parks, instead of people sunbathing or something similar, there was a picture of rabbits running through the park at night.
“It was very much like it was written for people who already loved Helsinki. It was an introduction to a city, but it was obviously written from (the point of view of) people that live there, from locals or people who already knew the city,” she says.
For the San Diego and Tijuana version of the book, she had already created a list of places that she could take her daughter in the county, but it was important to make sure that this project included the region, so she was researching online, checking out Facebook groups, sending out Google forms for locals to fill out and share some of their favorite spots, chatting up people in line at the store.
“I was very concerned about making sure that we were not producing a book about La Jolla. That we were producing a book that covered all parts of the county and Tijuana as equitably as possible to appeal to people who live there and to celebrate all of these great places and, especially, to try to find the places that are not d on the tourism website. This is a book for locals, by locals,” says Groth, who lives in North Park.
The point of the book is to celebrate the places in it while also advocating for building more public spaces. She wants to the funding and design of the spaces, especially in deg them with the communities that will use and steward the spaces for generations. All of the 140 locations in the book had to be free and publicly accessible, as a requirement for inclusion; she purposely focused on including places that people could get to on public transportation, for example. It was also about telling a story of a region as a united whole, which is why both Spanish and English are featured on the same pages in the essays and descriptions. There are places that are a clear reflection of the vibe of San Diego and Tijuana—spaces for surfing, skate parks, arts and culture, and community-advocated places like Chicano Park or Tecolote Canyon.
Although some places in the book may be privately owned, they’re still free to enter, like shopping malls, and that was important. The move toward more private spaces raises issues of accessibility, and as an architect and urbanist, that’s concerning for Groth.
“Whether it’s an actual accessibility issue of what we can and cannot pay to enter, or there’s a perceived accessibility issue of, ‘I’m not welcome there because I look a certain way’ or ‘I’m from a certain part of our city,’” she says. “And, I think the point of the book is to try to break that down as much as possible and celebrate the places that everyone is welcome in.”
