From bookstores and cafés to streets and leftover spaces, everyday places can serve as important sites of civic engagement. Unlike normative public spaces, these everyday sites of engagement straddle the divide between public and private spaces. They may be fluid in terms of their materialization in time and space. From liberal democracies to oppressed societies, they embody the agency of actors and collectives and offer affordances absent in institutionalized public spaces. These sites can be occupied on a regular basis or mobilized in times of crisis and emergency. Using cases from Taipei, Seattle, and Singapore, this talk examines the following questions: In what ways do “everyday places” support civic engagement? How do these everyday forms of engagement serve as pathways for democratic practices? What are the implications of these cases for the roles of institutions, particularly in liberal democracies?
Jeff Hou, PhD, FASLA, is Provost’s Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, where he co-directs the Civic Resilience Lab. His work focuses on civic engagement, public space, and empowerment of marginalized communities. In a career spanning the Pacific, he has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, fishers, and villagers in Asia, and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North America, on projects ranging from wildlife conservation to community placemaking. Hou led a series of collaborative publications on urbanism and public space, including Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010), City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017), and Emerging Civic Urbanisms in Asia: Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore, and Taipei Beyond Development Urbanization (2022). He previously taught at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he directed the Urban Commons Lab.
This event is part of the lecture series “On Environment.” The series is organized by the Chair of Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
Environment is a broad conceptual idea with a history and many meanings. Today, the term is used ubiquitously. We are closely connected to what surrounds us and live in an environment more and less shaped by humans. In this series of lectures scholars from different disciplines address the concept, providing a lens into what it may mean to think environmentally.