In March 2023, Professor Jeffrey Hou was invited to deliver a talk on “Civic Urbanism Without Borders” at the University of Toronto, which was held in collaboration with the Global Taiwan Studies Initiative at the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, and John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.

In addition to the talk, a graduate student workshop was conducted with Professor Hou, moderated by Kachun Alex Wong. In the workshop, Professor Hou shared his experiences of researching in Asia, as well as his placemaking and border-crossing work.

The conversation is published in The Taiwan Gazette in two parts. The first part features Professor Hou’s discussion of his collaborative publications, his editing experiences, the dissemination of his work in Taiwan and mainland China, as well as his experiences practicing and teaching activism. The second part further unpacks the themes of his work on capitalism, public spaces, borders, civic resilience during COVID-19, digital urbanism, and lessons from Asian cities.

The conversation was conducted in English and has been edited for clarity.

Jeffrey Hou is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the director of the Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work focuses on the agency of marginalized social groups in transforming the built environments. In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers, and villagers in Asia, as well as inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, on projects ranging from the conservation of wildlife habitats to bottom-up placemaking.

We extend our sincere gratitude to Professor Tong Lam and administrator Dasha Kuznetsova for their efforts in organizing the graduate student workshop.

Interviewed and edited by Kachun Alex Wong
Copyedited by Sabrina Teng-io Chung

Workshop participants included Taro Cai, Ho Lam (Roland) Cheng, Sabrina Teng-io Chung, Hiu Fung Chung

Jeffrey Hou interviewed at the Asian Institute on March 13, 2023 (Credit: Sabrina Teng-io Chung)

Taiwan Gazette: Especially with your multiple edited volumes, your scholarship is very collaboration-based. How do you make those connections? How do you distinguish collaborative work from more single-authored work?

Jeffrey Hou: The collaborative nature of my work is rooted in my focus on community-engaged design, and collaboration is an important part of it. My early career was also instrumental in shaping my collaborative approach. As a graduate student, I participated in the North American Taiwan Studies Association, which was comprised of young graduate students across a wide spectrum of disciplines including political science, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. As someone with a professional background in architecture and urban design, being part of this eclectic group was an eye-opening experience that allowed me to broaden my perspective and find connections between my field and other disciplines.

At Berkeley where I was a doctoral student at the time, I also helped establish an organization called the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, which started with members from Japan, the US, and Taiwan in 1998. Later, it was joined by folks from Hong Kong, South Korea, and China, as well as Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. One of the exciting things about this organization was our ability to find common ground and explore differences despite being geographically distant. Our meetings and conferences were rich in discussion and dialogue, and I was able to learn from cases across many different cultural and institutional contexts. This interaction has continually inspired me. I find myself constantly conversing, comparing, networking, and making connections through the network which became a big part of my work.

Taiwan Gazette: Can you elaborate a bit more about your edited volumes, and how you see editing as a research methodology?

Jeffrey Hou: One of the reasons I started doing edited books was that I wanted to include a wide range of voices and perspectives. In many books I’ve edited, contributors are not just authors but also project leaders and doers. Their unique and authentic perspectives are novel to an outsider like me. This was particularly the case for Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010), and Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (2013), with chapters developed based on grounded knowledge and conceptualizations. As an outsider, I could not have produced all this grounded knowledge, but I could build a dialogue through edited volumes. The journey started with Insurgent Public Space, which began as a kind of “fun project” after my tenureship. Editing allows me to work with others and not be an isolated scholar. It’s a joy to network, make friends, and gain knowledge that I previously have no direct access to.

I would also add that creating an edited volume is similar to curating an exhibition. The goal is to gather the most compelling and significant work that relates to a particular theme or focus. In addition to my own edited volumes, I also write for others. While some editors prefer their authors to follow strict guidelines, I prefer to hear first from the contributors. After receiving their abstracts and initial drafts, I would identify the threads of their work that could be woven to form a larger story. I tend not to do too much content editing, rather, my focus is on the contributors’ unique voices. Ultimately, the edited volume is a collection of individual stories that come together to form a larger narrative.

Taiwan Gazette: You mentioned that you have included non-academic voices in the edited volumes. Seeing the content which is on inclusivity in urban spaces, I wonder how you think of the editing and peer reviewing process as also incorporating inclusive practices.

Jeffrey Hou: In Insurgent Public Space, there are several contributors who are not traditional scholars, such as James Rojas. Rojas, who I happened to know before, coined the idea of Latino urbanism. He is a planner-turned-artist, who writes beautifully. Even though he’s not an academic, he has a lot of grounded knowledge about his subject. Rojas’ voice and insights were critical to the success of the book. He and John Kamp have just recently published their own book called Dream Play Build: Hands-On Community Engagement for Enduring Spaces and Places (2022).

In addition to non-academic contributors, we also intentionally involved junior scholars in our project. Hung-Ying Chen (陳虹穎), for example, a graduate student at the National Taiwan University at the time of her involvement with Insurgent Public Space and Transcultural Cities, is now an Assistant Professor at National Chengchi University. She added an invaluable contribution to both projects. Junior scholars like her often have access to fresh materials and perspectives, in contrast with more established scholars like myself who may not have the time to conduct extensive fieldwork. Additionally, our collaboration can also provide junior scholars with opportunities to contribute to a larger project and gain experience in the field.

Taiwan Gazette: Perhaps we can move on to discuss your own writing, especially on urban community gardens. I would like to get your take on how much one has to know about a place in order to write about a place, especially in light of your multi-sited research in for example Taiwan and Seattle.

Jeffrey Hou: I often start my projects by following my inspirations, which keeps me going. My interest in community gardens began when I first started working on a project unrelated to community gardens in 2004. It was a street improvement project next to the Danny Woo International Community Garden, one of the largest community gardens in downtown Seattle. I was inspired by the interpersonal connections that were formed by gardeners at the Danny Woo Garden as documented in our interviews to gather their input for the street improvement project. The project has motivated me to further research why people garden, what gardens mean to them, and what the gardens mean to the community.

Danny Woo Gardeners who participated in the interview. (Credit: Taken by Jeffrey Hou)

Years later, I got involved with my colleagues in Taipei who were starting to build a movement to promote community gardens and urban agriculture. Ko Wen-Je (柯文哲), who was a mayoral candidate at the time, adopted the concept as a part of his campaign platform that later became a policy directive when he was elected. This was back in 2014 when Ko was still considered a progressive candidate. Even earlier, my colleagues from Seoul had approached me and translated my book, Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens (2009), into Korean. This supposedly became one of the first books in Korea about community gardens, and Mayor Park Won-soon (박원순) at the time also took up urban agriculture as an official policy. It was gratifying to know that the inspirations from the Danny Woo Garden ended up contributing to the policy of community gardens in both Seoul and Taipei.

Flyer of the community garden talk at the Blue House. (Credit: Image provided by Jeffrey Hou)

Taiwan Gazette: I am interested to find out more about how your work and correspondence with politicians have influenced policy. In addition, what is your experience in disseminating your work to a wider audience?

Jeffrey Hou: Not all of my work is necessarily intended to speak to a larger audience, but my work on urban community gardens has surprised me with its appeal to people on the ground. I remember giving a talk at the Blue House in Hong Kong in November 2015, where 30 or 40 people were packed into a small storefront space. We had similar gatherings in Taipei. At that time, people were hungry for knowledge and information about urban community gardens. There were few community gardens at the time, and it was important for people to learn about and find encouragement in successful cases overseas. They were also interested in how to grow small initiatives into something bigger, and scale them up to a city level. It was a validating experience for me to realize that this work spoke to a large audience.

Another moment that was just as gratifying for me was when I attended a gathering in Shanghai around 2017. I had published two books in Taiwan at the time, City Rebelling (《城市造反：全球非典型都市規劃術》, 2013) and City Remaking (《反造城市：台灣非典型都市規劃術》, 2013). The books had made their way around a network of young people including the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (定海橋互助社) in Shanghai. Many of them were interested in guerrilla urbanism, urban hacking, or self-organized urban initiatives. For many young people in China, this represents a form of tacit resistance that they can afford to engage in, particularly as a form of resistance against societal expectations for young people that is certainly more proactive than tang ping (躺平; passive resistance).

I didn’t realize the popularity and circulation of my books within this network of young people in China until the group members contacted me, and one of them even came to Seattle to meet me. We had a gathering in their dormitory-room-sized space inside a small three-story tall building. Around 20 to 30 people, mostly young individuals, and a few academics were packed into a small studio for the gathering.

It’s amazing how these unexpected moments can arise from working on a project like Insurgent Public Space and having it translated and published in Chinese. Initially, I didn’t anticipate that the work would resonate with such a large audience. But I now believe that if I feel strongly inspired by something, there’s a good chance that others may feel the same way, even if it’s just a subset of the population. This is how the public-facing aspect of my work came to being.

Lively discussion at the Dinghaiqiao Mutual Aid Society (Credit: Image provided by Jeffrey Hou)

Taiwan Gazette: You have discussed the reception of your work in the public community. How are they received in the academic community? I imagine that academics may be less receptive to activist work, or scholarship on informality, which is historically marginalized in design discourses. What are the pushbacks and frictions your work has received in academia, especially in design school?

Jeffrey Hou: In retrospect, I must have been fortunate not to encounter much resistance or opposition to my work, which may be due in part to my obliviousness. But I have indeed been fortunate to work in Seattle and at the University of Washington. Within their bubble of progressive politics, I haven’t had to defend the value of my work either as an academic or as a community-engaged designer.

In terms of the academic reception of my work, it was beyond my expectation and something that one could not have planned. For instance, when we published Insurgent Public Space in 2010, we didn’t realize that movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and others would occur the following year. Scholars and students started citing my work because the book was one of the few sources that addressed how individuals and communities could appropriate and transform public spaces as seen in the movements. The success of this work has certainly benefited from that tumultuous time which continues today.

In the past few years, I’ve noticed that activism has become more embraced by design education and the profession, which I didn’t anticipate, either. Events like Black Lives Matter, the murder of George Floyd, and unaccountable police brutality have led to an awakening or reawakening of our profession in terms of its complicity in structural racism. Students are hungry for more discussion of activism and social justice. I was fortunate to receive a fellowship from the Landscape Architecture Foundation to work on design activism in 2019, again, one year prior to the uprisings of 2020. I believe that more professionals are now more sensitive to what is happening in society and motivated to research and address social issues.

Jeffrey Hou together with current and former staff of IDEA Space in Seattle’s Chinatown International District (Credit: Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority)

Taiwan Gazette: Thank you for the amazing food for thought. Can you offer any advice to people who are working in the design profession or scholarship?

Jeffrey Hou: Looking back at my own graduate study, I realize that my focus was rather narrow initially. Like many students, I was primarily interested in my own focus without considering its broader implications. Fortunately, my professors at Berkeley kept pushing me to consider how my work relates to the broader scholarship and how it could impact the planning and design professions. When we worked on Insurgent Public Space, therefore, we didn’t just look at these seemingly idiosyncratic cases by themselves; we were also interested in how they upended the concept of public space. Similarly, in City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017), we examined how the protest movements redefined public spaces and democratic practices. It is important that we consider the broader implications of our work. That way we are able to reach a wider audience, both inside and outside of academia. This would be my one piece of advice.

Continue to Part 2 of the conversation.