Jeff Hou

Seattle

Jeffrey Hou is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture and Adjunct Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on design activism, community engagement, public space and democracy, and transcultural placemaking. In a career that spans across the Pacific, he 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. Hou is recognized for his writings on guerrilla urbanism and bottom-up placemaking, with collaborative publications including 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), City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017), and Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity (2017).