The Public City.
PUBLIC SPACES, SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PLACES
Public space reflects the identity and image of a city: it is the barometer of a city. In profound or mundane ways public space affects us all. Public space has an uplifting potential for cities and its people. The quality of public space is one of the most important measures of the quality of life in cities and neighborhoods. In cities, large and small, the realization that public space is essential to our well-being has generated a newfound interest and investment in public space that has brought citizens back to urban cores. At the same time, the social and political uprisings have reinforced the role of public space as the geography of the public sphere and a place to express diverse opinions and demand justice.
Wednesday, October 28 at 7.30pm
Photo credits : EEJCC
Watch our Conversation here.
conversationalists.
Ken Greenberg
Ken Greenberg is an urban designer, teacher, writer, former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto and Principal of Greenberg Consultants.
For over four decades he has played a pivotal role on public and private assignments in urban settings throughout North America and Europe, focusing on the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts, neighborhoods and on campus master planning, regional growth management, and new community planning. His work sits at the intersection of urban design, architecture, landscape, mobility, social and economic development. Cities as diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis, Washington DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan Puerto Rico have benefited from his advocacy and passion for restoring the vitality, relevance and sustainability of the public realm in urban life. In each city, with each project, his strategic, consensus-building approach has led to coordinated planning and a renewed focus on urban design. He is the recipient of the 2010 American Institute of Architects Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Design Excellence and the 2014 Sustainable Buildings Canada Lifetime Achievement Award. He was selected as a Member of the Order of Canada in 2020.
Jeff Hou
Jeff Hou is Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of Urban Commons Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on public space, democracy, community design, and civic engagement.
In a career that spans the Pacific, Hou 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, on projects ranging from conservation of wildlife habitats to design of urban open space. He has written extensively on the agency of citizens and communities in shaping the built environments, with edited, co-authored, and co-edited books 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), Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity (2017), and City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (2017). Most recently, he served as a guest editor for the special issue on Guerrilla Urbanism (2020) for Urban Design International.
Hou is a recipient of the 2019 CELA Award for Excellence in Research and/or Creative Work and the 2011 CELA Award for Excellence in Service-learning Education. His collaborative publications have won the EDRA Great Places Book Award in 2010, 2012, and 2018. Hou’s community engagement work in Seattle’s Chinatown International District has also been recognized with a Community Builder Award from Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority, a Golden Circle Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans Greater Seattle Chapter, and a Community Stewardship Award from the Washington Chapter of American Society of Landscape Architects.
Host : Vikas Mehta
Vikas Mehta, Professor of Urbanism, is the Fruth/Gemini Chair, Ohio Eminent Scholar of Urban/Environmental Design and Coordinator for the Urban Design Certificate. Dr. Mehta’s work focuses on the role of design and planning in creating a more responsive, equitable, stimulating and communicative environment. He is interested in various dimensions of urbanity through the exploration of place as a social and ecological setting and as a sensorial art. This work emphasizes the sense of place and place distinctiveness, design and visualization of urban places and activities, and cities and regions as just, equitable and sustainable living systems. Dr. Mehta’s work on the urban street emphasizes the street as a heterogeneous, multicultural, multigenerational and multiuse public space. He has developed new measures of sociability that have advanced existing methods to study human behavior in public spaces. Dr. Mehta is the co-editor of Companion to Public Space (Routledge, 2020), editor of Public Space, a 4-volume anthology (Routledge, 2015), and author of 101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School (with Matthew Frederick, Three Rivers Press/Penguin, 2018) and The Street: a quintessential social public space (Routledge, 2013 and 2014) that received the 2014 Book Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) and was also a finalist for the 2014 Francis Tibbalds Award for Best Book of the Year. He is currently co-editing the Public Space Reader (Routledge, forthcoming 2021).
Dr. Mehta is the co-editor of two journals, Children, Youth and Environments and the Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding.