For the past 30 years or so Jeff Hou says his career has focussed on the theories and practice of community design.

Professor Hou is the Director of the Urban Commons Lab at Washington University and has previously served as Department Chair and Graduate Program Coordinator for the Department of Landscape Architecture there.

He livestreamed into the 2021 NZILA Firth conference in Tauranga earlier this year to present on Spatial Justice: Placemaking Without Borders.

He began by telling delegates that with the continuing migrating and shifting of people the demographics of urban and rural populations is changing and he had strong words for the landscape architecture profession along with other design and planning professionals.

“Boundaries and borders call into question the conditions of inequality in society,” he told the conference and went on to say he believes it is the challenge for design and planning professionals to work to redress these inequalities.

“Recent events in the United States is a stark reminder of the persisent structural failures of cities and communities that we as a profession of design and planning are complicit to as we shape environmnets that often reinforce those inequalities.”

He went on to go through three projects which highlight the above issues and you can see and hear more from him in his presentation video below.

*Jeff Hou has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle since 2001. His research, teaching, and practice focus on community design, design activism, and engaging marginalized communities and citizens in the making of places. Jeff Hou is the author and editor of numerous books, including "Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities" (2010) and "Transcultural Cities: Border-crossing and Placemaking" (2013), "Growing Cities, Greening Community: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens" (2009)(with Julie Johnson and Laura Lawson), City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017)(with Sabine Knierbein). Jeff is the recipient of the 2018, 2012, and 2010 Great Places Book Award from Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). (Source: LinkedIn)