Jeffrey Hou

Jeffrey Hou is Professor of Landscape Architecture and the director of Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on public space, democracy, community design, and civic engagement. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with Indigenous tribes, farmers, and fishers in Taiwan; neighborhood residents in Japan; villagers in China; and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from conservation of wildlife habitats to design of urban open space. He has written extensively on the agency of citizens and communities in shaping the built environments, with edited, co-authored, and co-edited books including Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens (2009), Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010), Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (2013), Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (2015), Messy Urbanism: Understanding the ‘Other’ Cities of Asia (2016), Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity (2017), and City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017). Most recently, he served as a guest editor for the special issue on Guerrilla Urbanism for the journal Urban Design International.

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