Insurgent Public Space Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities

Winner of the EDRA book prize for 2012.

In cities around the world, individuals and groups are reclaiming and creating urban sites, temporary spaces and informal gathering places. These ?insurgent public spaces? challenge conventional views of how urban areas are defined and used, and how they can transform the city environment. No longer confined to traditional public areas like neighbourhood parks and public plazas, these guerrilla spaces express the alternative social and spatial relationships in our changing cities.

With nearly twenty illustrated case studies, this volume shows how instances of insurgent public space occur across the world. Examples range from community gardening in Seattle and Los Angeles, street dancing in Beijing, to the transformation of parking spaces into temporary parks in San Francisco.

Drawing on the experiences and knowledge of individuals extensively engaged in the actual implementation of these spaces, Insurgent Public Space is a unique cross-disciplinary approach to the study of public space use, and how it is utilized in the contemporary, urban world. Appealing to professionals and students in both urban studies and more social courses, Hou has brought together valuable commentaries on an area of urbanism which has, up until now, been largely ignored.

1. (Not) Your Everyday Public Space Part 1: Appropriating 2. Dancing in the Streets of Beijing: Improvised Uses within the Urban System 3. Latino Urbanism in Los Angeles: A Model for Urban Improvisation and Reinvention 4. Taking Place: Rebar’s Absurd Tactics in Generous UrbanismPart 2:Reclaiming 5. eXperimentcity: Culturing and Publicizing Sustainable Development of Berlin’s Freiräume6. Re-City, Tokyo: Putting "Publicness" into the Urban Building Stocks7. Claiming Residual Spaces in the Heterogeneous CityPart 3: Pluralizing 8. Claiming Latino Space: Building Cultural Capacity in the Public Realm9. ‘ Night Market’ in Seattle: Community Eventscape and the Remaking of Public Space10. Making Places of Fusion and Resistance: the Experiences of Immigrant Women in Taiwanese Townships11. How Outsiders Find Home in the City: Chung Shan in TaipeiPart 4: Transgressing 12. Machizukuri House and Its Expanding Networks: Making New Public Realm in Private Homes 13. Niwaroju: Private Gardens Serving the Public Realm14. Farmhouses as Urban/Rural Public SpacePart 5: Uncovering 15. Urban Archives: Public Memories of Everyday Places16. Funny…It Doesn’t Look Like Insurgent Space: the San Francisco Bureau of Urban Secrets and the Practice of History as a Public Art17. Mapping the Space of Desire: Brothel as a City Landmark18. Spatial Limbo: Re-inscribing Landscapes in Temporal SuspensionPart 6: Contesting 19. Public Space Activism, Toronto and Vancouver: Using the Banner of Public Space to Build Capacity and Activate Change20. Urban Agriculture in the Making of Insurgent Spaces in Los Angeles and Seattle21. When Overwhelming Needs Meets Underwhelming Prospects: Sustaining Community Open Space Activism in East St. Louis

Jeffrey Hou is Chair and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research and practice focus on design activism and engaging marginalized social groups in the making of public space. He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Planning and M.Arch. from University of California, Berkeley.