Book Review: Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities

Dancing Beijing residents turn overpasses into impromptu stages; San Francisco parking spaces become temporary pocket parks; private residential Tokyo gardens are newly opened to the public street. Each of these can be categorized as acts of “guerrilla urbanism.” Insurgent Public Space, a recent collection of essays edited by University of Washington professor Jeffrey Hou, offers an exploration of these innovative (and often extralegal) alterations to urban space. As one of the few scholarly texts on this topic, the collection carries the burden of introducing this movement and its underlying theories. In Hou’s introduction, he defines guerrilla urbanism broadly as “citizen initiatives and informal activities” (9) occurring in – and redefining – urban public space. Such actions have garnered increased attention since the book’s 2010 publication. For example, the aforementioned repurposing of parking spaces into small parks has spread nationwide via Park(ing) Day, and the Occupy Wall Street movement has generated dialogue around citizen use of privately owned public spaces, or POPS