Neighborhood Matching Fund. Seattle celebrated the 20th anniversary of its Neighborhood Matching Fund last year. More than 4000 community self-help projects have been completed over that time. The city's $50 million investment has leveraged $70 million in community resources, and tens of thousands of people have become involved in their communities and with their government.

Transcultural Cities Symposium. The Department of Landscape Architecture at University of Washington hosted an interdisciplinary symposium titled “Transcultural Cities” in Seattle in February 2011. Funded by the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), participants of the symposium from 12 countries examined the agency of place and placemaking in engendering cross-cultural learning and understanding through case studies of over 20 cities around the world. Selected papers from the symposium are expected to be published in an edited volume.

Personal Notes

Hyungchan Ahn in the graduate program in urban design at Seoul National University is preparing to write his PhD thesis about the characteristics of government-supported participatory community design projects in Korea.

Graeme Bristol received a prize for the first International Competition for Architectural Research Papers sponsored by the UIA Education Commission and the Federation of Institutes of Korean Architects, for a paper entitled “Human Rights and Architectural Education.” Graeme been promoting a Human Rights Initiative to the UIA and to my own national architectural Institute (RAIC) a proposal to mainstream human rights in the practice of architecture. He is currently working on getting a second mobile school built for the children of migrant construction workers in Thailand. The first school, completed in 2009, now has more than 100 children in it.  It was featured in a children’s book, Off to Class: Incredible and Unusual Schools Around the World. 

Jim Diers have toured Australia eight times in the past five years, helping several cities to implement bottom-up planning and more than a dozen councils to replicate Seattle's Neighborhood Matching Fund. In September, he visited many community self-help projects including several men's sheds where retirees support one another while engaging in woodworking to benefit the community; an overgrown lot in Newcastle that neighbors restored with native plants, attracting a family of tawny frogmouths; and a community garden and kitchen in Wodonga where neighbors from all walks of life work together to grow organic produce and prepare gourmet meals for the hungry. Meanwhile, he has been working with the UK's coalition government and community foundations to establish a nationwide neighborhood matching fund program. The Taiwanese edition of his book, Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way, is now in its second printing.

Mike Douglass, Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Hawai’I is working on research concerning livable cities in East and Southeast Asia, Globopolis versus Cosmopolis, filmmaking for social research and planning, and public and civic space.

Jeff Hou received the Gold Circle Award from the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) Greater Seattle Chapter for significant contribution to the Asian American community and its heritage.

Yekang Ko has recently joined the Pacific Rim Community Design Network. Yekang Ko is a PhD Candidate in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at University of California, Berkeley. Since 2008, Yekang has been working on developing ecological land use plans and eco-tourism strategies for Ganghwa Island and Songdo International City in South Korea. She also investigated the potential environmental and social impact of Incheon's large-scale tidal power plants on endangered birds' habitats and local communities. Her works are based on environmental science, planning, design, policy, and active collaboration with local NGOs and residents.  Yekang has taught about these projects in the Environmental Planning Studio at UC Berkeley from 2009 to 2011 with Randy Hester and Marcia McNally.

Recent Publications

Bristol, Graeme. (2011) Architecture and Human Rights, in Cushman, Thomas (ed.) Handbook of Human Rights. London and New York: Routledge.

Douglass, Mike, K.C. Ho and Giok-ling Ooi, eds. (2010), Globalization, the Rise of Civil Society and Civic Spaces in Pacific Asia Cities (London:  Routledge) [soft cover edition]. 

Douglass, Mike, Executive Producer and Co-Director with Henry Mochida (2010), Dancing in the Park – Hanoi at Its Millennium, Hawaii International Film Festival, November.

Douglass, Mike (2010), “Globalizing the Household in East Asia,” Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy, XI:1, 63-77.

Douglass, Mike (2010), “A Global Householding Perspective on Migration and Social Change in Korea, Japan and Taiwan,” Studies in Urban Humanities, 1:1, 167-212.

Douglass, MIke (2010), “Globalization, Mega-projects and the Environment:  Urban Form and Water in Jakarta,” Environment and Urbanization, 1:1, 45–65.

Hou, Jeffrey. (2011) Differences Matter: Learning to Design in Partnership with Others. In Doble, Cheryl, Paula Horrigan, and Tom Angotti (eds.), At the Boundaries: Transformative Design and Planning Education through Community-based Service-Learning. Berkeley, CA: New Village Press.

Ko,Y., Schubert, D.K., Hester, R.T. (2011) A conflict of greens: green development versus habitat preservation; the case of Incheon, South Korea. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, 53: 3, 3- 17

Ko,Y. & Schubert, D.K. (2011)"Green" New Deal Projects Threaten Korea's Rivers and Tidal Flats. World Rivers Review 26: 3, 15

Ronan Paddison, Peter J. Marcotullio and Mike Douglass, eds. (2010), Connected Cities: Histories, Hinterlands, Hierarchies and Networks, Urban Studies, Economy, Volume III (Thousand Oaks, CA:  Sage).