University of Toronto!

Hi all! Some news!

Starting now, I’ll be a (Visiting Assistant) Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department of Geography and Planning. I’m on leave from Portland State University, as my partner got a job here in Toronto (UT-Scarborough: Arts, Culture and Media) and we decided to come and see what Canada has to offer.

In our first 48 hours here, Canada has offered us Greek food, a lot of rain, and very polite immigration officers.

I will miss my students and colleagues at the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning sorely, but I will be back to visit, continue archival research, sit on some graduate student committees, see friends, and swim in waterfalls.

This fall, I’ll be teaching an undergraduate class called Urban Planning Processes, and a graduate class called Planning Decision Methods. I look forward to learning a new city — its history and its systems — and meeting students with a different perspective.

If you’re in town, get in touch and we’ll go get dumplings!

Review: City Unsilenced

I got to review City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy, an edited volume on protest around the world in the last decade, centered on Urban Public Spaces, for the journal, Urban Studies.

“In response to austerity politics and market-based governance of urban land, large-scale social protest has erupted in the public spaces of cities across the globe. In City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy (Routledge, 2017), editors Jeffrey Hou of UW-Seattle and Sabine Knierbein of SKuOR, Vienna – both scholars of the dynamics of public space –  have compiled the stories, strategies and theories derived from social movements in urban spaces since 2011. In this volume, the collected authors demonstrate how public spaces in cities operate as both the subject and object of civic unrest.”

Check out the full review here and let me know if you can’t get behind the paywall.