The vast majority of earthquakes strike inside the , a string of volcanoes and tectonic activity that wraps around the coastlines of the Pacific Ocean. But when an earthquake hits, the areas that experience the strongest shaking aren’t always the places that suffer the greatest damage.

Take the massive , which caused extensive damage in Taiwan in the fall of 1999 and killed more than 2,400 people. The distribution of damage followed an uneven pattern: Deaths caused by the earthquake were concentrated not in densely populated city centers, but in those cities’ suburbs and outer fringes. A similar pattern has occurred following earthquakes in China, Chile and Nepal.

More than two decades later, researchers at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý have identified a hidden factor behind what they call ‘suburban syndrome’ — migration. Workers from small, rural communities often move into the outer edges of cities, which offer greater economic opportunities but often have low-quality housing that is likely to suffer greater damage during an earthquake. The risk grows even more when migrants come from low-income or tribal villages.

The findings, , suggest that emergency management organizations should pay greater attention to migration and housing quality when developing disaster mitigation and response plans.

UW News spoke with lead author , an assistant professor of environmental & occupational health sciences and of urban planning, to discuss ‘suburban syndrome,’ how migration can amplify disparities in a disaster’s impact, and what U.S. officials can learn from a Taiwanese disaster.

Your work on this study builds on an existing model that assesses earthquake risk by considering migration patterns and the movement of vulnerable populations. What does the existing model miss, and why is it important to fill those gaps?����

Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen: This risk-assessment model has been used by many organizations internationally and in the United States. For example, FEMA uses a similar risk model to assess populations exposed to hazards, vulnerabilities and potential disaster impacts. They typically do a comprehensive risk assessment geographically within states and counties, identify areas with potential larger impacts, and then draft a preparedness plan.

In United States, temporary domestic migrants and undocumented immigrants don’t always officially register in government systems. One common reason is the fear of deportation or other legal repercussions. And so, when a government agency like FEMA allocates resources for disaster preparedness or recovery, relying on registered population data can lead to an underestimate of the support required in certain areas.

In Taiwan, our study case, many migrant workers moving from rural to urban areas don’t update their registered residence. They still have their registration back in their hometown, like in a tribal area. It just doesn’t make sense to re-register, because they might have multiple jobs within a single year in different places. To minimize expenses, some workers look for the lowest possible rent, and their rental housing might not be officially registered either. Those could be informal housing structures, like a metal floor added on top of a concrete building, which don’t comply with safety regulations. The informality of this process can help lower their cost of living, but can also leave them more vulnerable to disasters.

How did you get started in this research?��

TKC: I’ll share my personal story, but I also want to acknowledge my co-authors for their years of work in risk assessments. For me, it started back in 2010, when I volunteered in a tribal area of Taiwan teaching computer skills. This provided bigger lessons for me than anything I could’ve taught them. I learned how teenagers often move from their tribal areas downhill to nearby cities to take construction jobs during the off-crop seasons. Those jobs pay more than farm work, but they’re also very physically demanding and often lack worker protections like job security and health insurance. Seeing that put a seed in my mind.��

When I was a master’s student, a team from the National Earthquake Center and Academia Sinica in Taiwan was working on a risk assessment of the Chi-Chi earthquake using the exposure, vulnerability and hazard framework. They had already published a fundamental , and reached out to me to develop an extended study by incorporating spatial statistics. That collaboration eventually evolved into the study in this paper.��

The COVID-19 pandemic also shaped this study. I came across news about how migrant workers were stuck in urban fringe areas of India. Because of the lockdown, they weren’t able to continue their work, and their crowded living conditions left them at even greater risk during the pandemic. I started to wonder: How can we shift from a pure statistical model to something more meaningful? How can we bring migration into the center of the discussion?��

The final push came from colleagues’ work at the UW. I’ve noticed initiatives for undocumented students and research efforts around environmental justice and health equity. For example, my co-author ’s research on migrant worker’s health was particularly motivating. We read and wrote back and forth to refine the framing and discussion in this paper. ��

How did you incorporate migration data into a larger earthquake-risk model, and what did you find?

TKC: At the time of the Chi-Chi earthquake in the late 1990s, we didn’t have any detailed migration data. Today, new research uses mobile phone signals to track people, but such data wasn’t available back then. So we adapted the — a model widely used to predict human migration — to estimate migration flow and used it as a new way to estimate migrants from low-income and tribal areas. This provided new variables to incorporate into the large risk model.��

Most of our findings are supportive of previous studies, where we can see, logically, if there’s stronger ground movement, there are likely to be more fatalities. That’s a very straightforward way of thinking of how disasters can happen. However, it’s not just a physical story. We also confirm that in areas where incomes are lower, there are more fatalities. Income is a known risk factor in the vulnerability theory. What’s unique in this study is that we tested whether an increase in migration flows leads to an increase in fatalities, and we found that to be true.��

Tell me about the migration model. What is it estimating?��

TKC: We applied the radiation model and adapted it to measure different migration populations. The fundamental idea of the radiation model comes from a simple model called the . In this context, gravity refers to the idea that larger populations have a stronger “pull” on people in nearby communities. The model assumes that, for a place, the number of people who want to migrate to nearby cities depends on the population size of those cities. Larger cities tend to attract more people.����

If the distance is too far, then it costs too much to travel, so the model will predict fewer migrants. But if the city is closer, or even far away but has a very large population, it becomes a more attractive destination, leading to greater migration flow.����

The radiation model builds on these principles and adds another layer. It considers competitors along the way. In other words, migration flow may also be influenced by other cities or opportunities that lie between the starting point and the destination.��

At first glance, it seems obvious that greater migration would lead to higher fatalities in a given area, just because there are more people present when disaster strikes. Is that the primary driver, or are there other factors at play?����

TKC: Logically, if there are more people, and the percentage of fatalities is equal, then there should be more people dying from a specific event. But we found it’s not just about population numbers. There are two additional factors: When migrant workers are from areas with lower incomes, or when they are from tribal areas, those factors significantly contribute to higher fatalities in the places they migrate to.��

Our hypothesis is that it’s about housing safety. Migrant workers tend to move to cities, and when cities are more expensive, affluent workers might be able to secure housing that offers better protection against disasters. However, workers from tribal or low-income areas tend to settle in urban fringe zones where affordable housing options might not meet safety standards, making them more vulnerable to earthquakes.

Why did you choose to study this earthquake from 1999 in particular?����

TKC: The research team that invited me to work on this project was interested in the Chi-Chi earthquake, partly because it was one of the most disastrous in Taiwan’s history. And even 20 years later, there’s still a conference focused on the Chi-Chi earthquake that brings domestic and international researchers to talk about it.

How widely applicable are your findings? Could they help us better understand hazards in other earthquake-prone areas of the world, like, say, the Pacific Northwest?����

TKC: It’s important to consider this risk assessment as a tool for preparedness for future hazards. When the next earthquake occurs, migrant communities will likely face elevated impacts if housing safety policies do not improve.

I believe the migration component is universally important, even outside Taiwan. There has always been a paradox, a structural dilemma of disaster governance: Because migrants are often invisible, they suffer from little support. But making them visible can sometimes lead to exclusion and discrimination. This model represents migrants in a geographic sense rather than identifying every person individually through government surveillance, which could address this challenge. By protecting anonymity while still accounting for migrant populations, the model might help ensure their needs are considered in housing safety and resource allocation.

Co-authors on this study include Diana Ceballos of the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences; Kuan-Hui Elaine Lin of National Taiwan Normal University, Thung-Hong Lin of Academia Sinica in Taiwan; and Gee-Yu Liu and Chin-Hsun Yeh of the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in Taiwan.

For more information, contact Chen at kthchen@uw.edu.

Seattle is routinely listed as one of the most and cities in the nation. The city government has committed to , which aims to completely eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030, and embarked on a slew of infrastructure projects: , and .��

Such safety projects sometimes meet opposition from local business owners, who worry that reduced parking and disruption to regular traffic flow will hurt their bottom line.����

New research from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý suggests those worries are unfounded. , an analysis of seven safety projects across Seattle found they had no negative impact on the annual revenues of nearby businesses for three years after construction began. The results could help city officials gather support from local business owners and remove a barrier to fulfilling Seattle’s Vision Zero pledge.��

“Some business owners may be concerned that Vision Zero pedestrian safety projects lead to a trade-off between safety and economic viability. Our research found there is no economic harm in improving safety, and such projects offer the health benefits of reducing injuries,” said study co-author , a UW affiliate professor of environmental and occupational health sciences and of urban planning.��

The study was led by UW alumnus , who completed the research for concurrent master’s degrees in public health and urban planning and now works at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.����

Researchers identified seven road safety projects of varying types, from the addition of bike lanes and crosswalks to speed limit adjustments and the removal of traffic lanes. The project sites were in six of Seattle’s seven council districts — they could not find a suitable project in West Seattle — and were all initiated between 2006 and 2014. All seven sites were commercially zoned and close to similar commercial zones that remained unchanged.��

Using revenue data that each Washington business submits to the state, researchers established a baseline of taxable sales for businesses adjacent to each safety project, as well as for businesses in the nearby comparison areas. Researchers included only businesses that the state Department of Revenue database identified as “retail trade,” “accommodation and food services,” and “other services.” They excluded businesses from sectors that are less reliant on street-level activity, like manufacturing or construction.��

In the three years after each safety intervention, researchers found no significant difference in the year-over-year change in revenue of the businesses in the intervention and comparison sites. On average, taxable sales increased in both the intervention and comparison sites over time, and at largely the same rate.����

“If there had been a major impact of taking away parking spaces or disrupting traffic leading to a loss of business, you would expect sales to go down in places that had the interventions and not go down in the comparison sites,” Dannenberg said. “In fact, they stayed about the same, within statistical range. The sales data do not suggest any economic harm occurred, in fact there were a few instances where the safety interventions might have even helped sales.”��

The study has some limitations. For example, researchers did not examine whether certain types of businesses might have been affected differently than others, or how factors like the supply of nearby parking spots unaffected by construction might have impacted the results.��

Dannenberg, who serves on the Seattle planning commission, believes this work may help facilitate communication between city planners and business interests.����

“A walkable environment generally encourages business,” Dannenberg said. “I think this work has�� implications that will be useful to policy makers who work on pedestrian safety and livable community issues.”��

Other co-authors are Jessica Acolin and Paul Fishman of the Department of Health Systems and Population Health in the UW School of Public Health.��

For more information, contact Dannenberg at adannen@uw.edu.��

Sugar-sweetened beverages are a known contributor to several health issues, including poor diet quality, weight gain and diabetes. While several studies have shown that taxing sweetened beverages significantly reduces purchasing, questions have been raised about whether the taxes place a greater economic burden on lower-income households.

New research from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, , addressed the issue by examining the economic equity impacts of sweetened beverage taxes in three cities: Seattle, San Francisco and Philadelphia.

“Sugar-sweetened beverages are the new tobacco,” said , senior author and clinical professor of health systems and population health in the UW School of Public Health. “Public health researchers and others have been working for some time to reduce sales of these beverages. Taxes worked well to reduce tobacco purchases, and they’ve been applied and appear to work equally well in sugary drinks.”

The study showed the tax paid by households accounted for a larger proportion of income for lower-income households, but still only 0.01% to 0.05%. The annual per capita dollar amount that households paid toward the tax, between $5.50 and $31, didn’t differ by income level.

The researchers also found that sweetened beverage taxes redistributed dollars from higher- to lower-income households. More dollars went toward funding programs that benefit lower-income communities than those households paid in taxes. The annual net benefit to lower-income communities ranged from $5.3 to $16.4 million per year across the three U.S. cities.

“Cities have prioritized funding programs that benefit lower-income populations, which makes sweetened beverage tax policies more economically equitable,” Krieger said.

For example, revenue raised by has been used to fund programs and services that increase access to healthy food and support child health and learning in early childhood. In 2020, sweetened beverage tax revenue was also used to provide support to communities disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The researchers studied the volume of beverage purchases made in stores by 1,141 households in the three U.S. cities to estimate taxes paid by households during the first year after tax implementation. They then used city population data to calculate the per capita amount of sweetened beverage tax paid by income level.

The authors also reviewed public documents and contacted city representatives to find the dollar amount of annual tax revenue and the amount invested in programs serving lower-income communities.

“There aren’t a lot of studies right now that look at actual household purchases of these taxed beverages,” said co-lead author , UW associate teaching professor of economics. “They mostly look at retail-level data. But you don’t know what people are doing at a household level. They could be going to another city to buy their sweetened beverages and bringing them back to Seattle. This study catches all of that. We’re just looking at households that live in these cities and the totality of everything they report having purchased.”

The study shows that sweetened beverage taxes “can be an economically progressive policy,” Krieger said. Seven local jurisdictions in the United States, the Navajo Nation and at least 45 other nations have implemented sweetened beverage taxes.

“These taxes selectively and specifically benefit people with lower incomes to a greater extent than people with higher incomes, because the money that’s raised by taxes goes toward programs serving lower-income communities,” Krieger said. “That’s from the economic point of view.

“The taxes also benefit people with lower incomes because they drive down consumption more and sales more for that population. People will consume less of an unhealthy product and they’ll be healthier because of that. It’s a win for health, it’s a win for the pocketbook and it’s a win for their communities.”

, UW associate professor of health systems and population health and of epidemiology, was a corresponding author and co-principal investigator.

Other co-authors from the UW were , clinical instructor of health systems and population health; , senior research scientist in the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, , affiliate associate professor of urban design and planning; and , who recently graduated with a master’s degree in epidemiology. , associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, was also a co-author.

The study was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s with partial support from an NICHD grant to the at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý.

For more information, contact James Krieger at jkrieger@hfamerica.org and Melissa Knox at knoxm@uw.edu.

Correction on 7/13: A previous version of this story said that the annual net benefit to lower-income communities ranged from $5.3 to $19.1 million per year across the three U.S. cities. The latter number is actually $16.4 million.

Carving out a brave space: Courage in art

May 3, 7:00 PM | HUB Lyceum & Online

Free | More info

UDP PC Lecture Series – Climate Displacement and Migration: The Unknown Journey for Washingtonians

May 5, 6:00 PM |

Climate change’s effects are already being realized globally and across the US–including in Washington State. These effects manifest in specific events like the recent wildfires in Okanogan and Douglas Counties and in longer-term, chronic changes like the Pacific Northwest’s heat wave last summer and slow-onset sea-level rise along the coast. All these effects are making some places less habitable, forcing residents to leave temporarily or, in some cases, permanently. But where do they go and how? What awaits them as they evacuate, move, or migrate? Are there programs or policies in place to provide support and protection?��

The UW Department of Urban Design and Planning ‘s Professionals Council is pleased to present an evening with Dr. Carlos Martín, Rubenstein Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies to talk about current and future climate displacement.

Free |

School of Art + Art History + Design Graduation Exhibitions

Ongoing |

• Graduation Exhibition 3: May 4 – 14
• Honors Graduation Exhibition 1: May 18 – 21
• Honors Graduation Exhibition 2: May 25 – 28

Free |

Kollar American Art Lecture – ShiPu Wang

May 5, 6:00 PM |

Can you name more than one female artist of Japanese descent active on the West Coast before WWII? Why do we know so little about Japanese American women who were in fact vital contributors to early 20th-century American art? In this lecture sponsored by the School of Art + Art History + Design, Dr. ShiPu Wang shares his decades of rediscovery of imagery by American artists of Asian descent and takes a closer look at paintings by three trailblazing women who were all displaced during WWII but never stopped making art. Their diverse portraiture in particular reveals untold stories of turmoil and perseverance, as well as historical marginalization of female artists of the racioethnic minority that merits reconsideration and intervention.

Humans re-shape the environments where they live, with cities being among the most profoundly transformed environments on Earth. New research now shows that these urban environments are altering the way life evolves.

A study led by evolutionary biologists at the University of Toronto Mississauga and including the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý examines whether parallel evolution is occurring in cities all over the world. In findings published March 18 in the journal , the analyzed data collected by 287 scientists in 160 cities in 26 countries, who sampled the white clover plant in their cities and nearby rural areas.

What they found is the clearest evidence yet that humans in general, and cities specifically, are a dominant force driving the evolution of life globally.

“We’ve long known that we’ve changed cities in pretty profound ways and we’ve dramatically altered the environment and ecosystems,” said co-lead author James Santangelo, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto Mississauga. “But we just showed this happens, often in similar ways, on a global scale.”

The researchers examined white clover because it is one of the few organisms present in almost every city on Earth, providing a tool to understand how urban environments influence evolution. The study illustrates that the environmental conditions in cities tend to be more similar to each other than to nearby rural habitats. In that sense, downtown Toronto is more comparable to downtown Tokyo in many ways than it is to surrounding farmland and forests outside of the city.

In addition to observing global adaptation to cities, researchers identified the genetic basis of that adaptation and the environmental drivers of evolution. White clover produces hydrogen cyanide as both a defense mechanism against herbivores and to increase its tolerance to water stress, and the study found that clover growing in cities typically produce less of it than clover in neighboring rural areas due to repeated adaptation to urban environments.

It is the changes in the presence of herbivores and water stress in cities that is pushing white clover to adapt differently than their rural counterparts.

That finding holds true for cities across various climates, and the implications reach far beyond the humble clover plant.

“Increasing evidence shows that urbanization is causing rapid evolution in heritable traits of many plants and animal populations which provide important ecosystem functions that support human well-being, such as nutrient cycling, seed dispersal and biodiversity,” said co-author , UW professor of urban design and planning. “Finding a clear signal that cities are altering trait changes across the globe has important implications for ecosystems’ adaptive capacity that enables their stability and resilience in the face of rapid global environmental change.”

The information from this study can be used to start developing strategies to better conserve rare species and allow them to adapt to urban environments, researchers said. It can also help experts better understand how to prevent unwanted pests and diseases from adapting to human environments. In collecting more than 110,000 clover samples and sequencing more than 2,500 clover genomes, the team also created a massive dataset for further research.

“This study is a model to understand how humans change the evolution of life around us. Cities are where people live, and this is the most compelling evidence we have that we are altering the evolution of life in them. Beyond ecologists and evolutionary biologists, this is going to be important for society,” said co-author Rob Ness, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.

Other UW co-authors on the study, all doctoral students in the Urban Ecology Research Lab, are Karen Dyson, Tracy Fuentes and Meen Chel Jung.

For more information, contact Alberti at malberti@uw.edu.

This story is adapted from a press release from the University of Toronto Mississauga.

As an urban historian, studies how cities, and neighborhoods within cities, retain their character in the face of change.

How, he says, “neighborhoods remember themselves.”

An associate professor of urban design and planning at the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, Chalana has researched cities around the world, how development can alter the face and fabric of a community, and the role governments can play in the process.

In the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, which grew to be the center of the city’s LGBTQ community after World War II, Chalana has written about the designation of a “” in the Pike Street/Pine Street corridor. The city design regulations stipulate how, for example, the facade of an older building can be retained at the base of a newer, taller structure.

As the city has encouraged higher densities, the influx of development on Capitol Hill over the past decade has meant higher rents, for residents and businesses alike. The area has become more affluent, with fewer of the modest and “gritty” establishments that were more common in the 1990s and even early 2000s, and newcomers may not always see it as primarily a gay neighborhood, Chalana said. Meanwhile, LGBTQ communities are growing in other areas, such as West Seattle and Tacoma.

“The fact that gay people can move anywhere is a great sign of progress,” Chalana said. “But gay neighborhoods are still relevant, still needed. They are important for community-building, and for people to have support systems, especially for people who come from places where they weren’t supported, or who aren’t comfortable being out.”

And it’s not as if the changes on Capitol Hill are all bad, Chalana adds. Capitol Hill is still a vibrant neighborhood with a rich history.

“Change is integral to all cities,” he said. “Capitol Hill is still a gay neighborhood, but it’s a different type of gay neighborhood. It remains the gay heart of the city.”

For more information, contact Chalana at chalana@uw.edu.

No commute, fewer interruptions from co-workers, and the ability to work longer hours — all were factors that boosted feelings of productivity among people who worked from home during the first several months of the pandemic.

At the same time, according to new data from the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý, those who felt less productive while working remotely pointed to the inefficiencies of communicating with colleagues, the needs of family, and demands around the house.

The , administered in partnership with the Puget Sound Regional Council, queried residents twice in 2020 — in spring and fall — to learn not only about work and transportation habits, but also lifestyle changes during the pandemic. In all, more than 4,500 people — mostly from King County and three surrounding counties —- responded to the online survey, which focused on different aspects of daily life at a time when business and movement restrictions were in place.

Survey results were published April 30 on the Puget Sound Regional Council’s . The research team published results from its spring 2020 data collection in the journal last winter.

“This was a natural experiment,” said , professor emeritus of urban design and planning at the UW and a co-author on the survey. “Our transportation system works fairly well, except during commute times, in cities around the world. So what happens when all these commuters are forced to be at home, which we can’t do in normal times?”

Generally speaking, the shift to a remote work environment affected hours spent on work, recreation and screens of all kinds. But the survey asked, about other lifestyle changes, too, such as eating out and grocery shopping, and whether respondents had moved or were planning to move, because those who could work from home theoretically could work from anywhere.

Among the survey’s findings:

• A lower percentage of people in fall 2020 (29%) than spring 2020 (39%) said they felt less productive. But of those reporting being more productive (about one-quarter of the respondents in fall and spring), a higher percentage said they were working more hours in the fall (43%) than in the spring (35%).
• An overwhelming majority (87% in the fall and 81% in the spring) said they had ordered takeout. In the fall, 59% of the respondents said they ordered takeout more often than before the pandemic, versus 48% in the spring).
• By fall 2020, 58% of respondents said they were less physically active than before the pandemic, a drop from 50% in the spring.
• Social media and screen time were up even higher by the fall compared to the spring, though researchers note that the presidential election may have influenced consumption.
• Almost 80% of respondents said they hadn’t moved to a new residence during the pandemic, and of the 11% who did move, most said they wanted more space, or easier access to the outdoors.

The answers varied somewhat depending on the time of year. Even the number of participants varied dramatically from one iteration of the survey to the next: More than three times as many people responded to the first survey in the spring as did in the fall. Researchers attributed much of the differences, both in numbers and answers, to the passage of time. People adapted to the pandemic and the changes it brought about. The abrupt disruption to normal life in March likely contributed to feelings of lower productivity, for example, compared to the second survey in the fall, when routines were more established, Moudon said.

The aim of the study – capturing behavior changes due to remote-work arrangements – meant the study sample reflected a particular occupational demographic: people whose jobs allowed them to work from home. In both surveys more than 60%% of respondents were women; more than 80% of respondents had four years or more of college, and about half had a household income of more than $90,000 a year.

In the next wave of the study, researchers will turn to essential workers, and conduct focus groups about their experiences as they continued to travel to or from work during the pandemic. Researchers want to better understand why some essential workers switched from riding transit to driving during the pandemic, and what could bring them back to using transit.

Researchers believe employers can learn from this data how to think about productivity and flexibility, especially as they plan for workers to return to in-person work.

“Good work productivity is related to other things in people’s lives,” Moudon said. “Life is not just work.”

The research was funded in part by the��. Co-authors on the project were of the UW Department of Urban Design and Planning, and of the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, along with UW doctoral student Xiao Shi, and Brian Lee and Mary Richards of the Puget Sound Regional Council.

For more information, contact Moudon at moudon@uw.edu.

The answer, he writes, isn’t as simple as building “bland or pastiche developments, nor throwing out the old entirely and imposing an ultra-modern monolith.” The book, published in February by Rowman and Littlefield, addresses “how to enact blended and contextualized urban change, using the past and the status quo as catalysts rather than castaways.”

It offers examples that emphasize the importance of context and offer solutions “to blend the past with the future.” These include moving a small Swedish city, and the revitalization of Irish market towns and property alongside London’s Waterloo Station.

is an attorney with experience in environmental, land use and real estate law and an affiliate associate professor of urban design and planning in the UW . The book’s co-author is , associate professor of urban and regional studies at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, where Wolfe is also a guest affiliate scholar.

Wolfe will discuss “Sustaining a City’s Culture” with journalist Steve Scher at .

“Sustaining a City’s Culture and Character” is third book in a trilogy by Wolfe on urbanism. The others are ” (2013, rev. ed. 2019), and “” (2017).

Wolfe blogs at sustainingplace.com. To learn more, contact him at chuck@seeingbettercities.com.

[UPDATE Nov. 19, 2020]��Are we getting “pandemic fatigue?” The UW survey below, conducted by in spring, sought faculty and staff views on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected telecommuting, online shopping, virtual socializing and remote learning.

The research team is now following up, asking questions relating to productivity at work, well-being at home and plans for mobility once the pandemic is under control. They are looking for survey participants to complete this new survey by Thanksgiving. The survey takes 15 minutes or less, depending on employment status. .

* * *

[ORIGINAL POST May 21, 2020] Three professors are teaming for a study of the mobility impacts of the coronavirus — and they are inviting UW faculty, staff and students to complete a short online to assist the research.

The research is being conducted by , professor emerita of urban design and planning in the College of Built Environments, with , associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and , professor of urban design and planning, along with student researchers.

The Catalyst survey, the researchers say, focuses on workers or students staying home and changing their commuting during the coronavirus and making “trade-offs between individual and household well-being and productivity.” It takes about 15 minutes to complete.

The research project “seeks to better understand the impact of abrupt changes following COVID 19-related shelter-in-place policies — changes including telecommuting, online shopping, virtual socializing and remote learning.”

Results from the survey, the researchers say, can inform future approaches to traffic and air pollution reduction over the long term, after the virus has passed. The virus and subsequent stay-at-home policies, the team writes, serve as “a natural experiment that could never have been conducted under normal circumstances.”

The survey has been circulated publicly for several days in the state and region, and the researchers are eager for input from the UW community. The survey has been approved by the UW Human Subjects Division and is funded by the , a coalition of transportation professionals and educators from the UW and several other institutions.

The team is partnering with the , which will have staff allocated to analyze the results, and the council intends to use the data for its regional transportation plan.

Find the survey here:

is a professor of landscape architecture and adjunct professor of urban design and planning in the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s . His research, teaching and practice focus on community design, design activism, cross-cultural learning and engaging marginalized communities in planning and design.

Hou has written extensively on the agency of��citizens and communities in shaping the built environments. He is the author of several books, including ��(2010).

His newest book is “,” co-edited by , associate professor for urban culture and public space at the Vienna University of Technology, and published by Routledge. Hou answered a few questions about his book for UW News.

What’s the concept of the book and how did it come about?

JH: The book examines the roles of public space in the rising number of protests around the world and as possibly a vestige of democracy. Specifically, we are interested in how urban public spaces provide visibility to critical social, political and economic issues of our time, how they allow a variety of participants and stakeholders to assemble, and how they necessitate negotiation of different interests and perspectives. As the book is a collection of case studies around the world from Barcelona to Brazil, Madrid to Mexico City, and Taipei to Tokyo, we are also interested in the common features that link these different cases.

The book came out my visiting professorship in Vienna in 2014 through the (SKuOR) at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). During that time, my host professor Knierbein and I were interested in expanding the contemporary thinking on the role of public space. As we were both interested in recent social movements around the world, the relationships between urban resistance and public space quickly came to focus.

What do recent urban resistance tactics around the world have in common in their use of public space?

JH: Some of the common threads include the use of social media for messaging and enabling spontaneous mass mobilizing in a way that was not possible before. The communication technology also allows for a much more rapid dissemination of information, allowing movements to spread in regions and become networked.

Other common threads include creative uses of public space that welcome a variety of participants, even parents and children. During the Occupy Movement as well as a number of other examples, ordinary plazas or streets were transformed to places that would host mobile libraries, art workshops and day cares, as well as areas for tents, food and recycling stations, etc. There were also performances and music that helped create an ambience that made them more festival-like than protests, hence the term protestival.

“Acts of public space-based resistance,” you write, “disrupt the neoliberal taming of public life.” Could you explain for the non-expert?

JH: Neoliberalism is a system of governance that favors privatization, austerity, deregulation and reduction in government spending. With declining public funding, the development and maintenance of parks and other open space has relied increasingly on private funding, resulting in the privatization of public space.

At the same time, with diminishing support for public space, private spaces such as shopping malls have increasingly replaced streets and plazas as more desirable places of everyday life. These trends have led to a kind of public space and public life that is “tamed” and devoid of possibilities for active political expressions. How often do we see a political gathering at a mall, for example? In a way, the recent public space-based resistance has revived a role of public space that enables the freedom of expression and assembly to be exercised.

Have not public spaces been the scene of protest and conflict throughout history? What is unique about their 21^st��century manifestations?

JH: Yes, public spaces have long been the scene of protest and conflict in history, which we acknowledge in the book. Aside from the role of technology and social media, and the popularity of protestivals, one of the main features of recent protests worldwide has to do with how they are all responding to the different manifestations and impacts of neoliberalism. From debt and the housing crisis in Spain and austerity in Greece to gentrification in San Francisco, the issues that the local populations are facing all share a common thread in the way neoliberal practices are undermining the institutions of democracy that protect the rights and welfare of individuals and communities. The recent protests are part of a large process of mobilization, learning and reawakening to these challenges.

You begin by asking, “What is the significance of urban resistance and public space in the age of shrinking democracy and increasing enclosure?” What, briefly put, were your conclusions?

JH: Our main conclusion is this: These recent protests suggest the important role of public space in supporting active democracy at a time when our democratic institutions are being threatened and undermined by neoliberal practices and resurgence of totalitarianism.

More specifically, public space is important as a means for mass assembly and for bringing attention and visibility to issues that are important to communities and the society. By serving as a stage for contests of interests and perspectives, it is a space of learning. By enabling linkages of issues and challenges, it is also a space for re-scaling and re-politicizing, meaning that a local issue may be an outcome of systematic exploitation, and that this realization can trigger an engagement of political mobilization at a different scale.

Lastly, public space can serve as what we call grounds of alter-politics, a space where alternative visions of society and political engagement can take form.

Finally, you argue that with democracy in retreat globally, public space demonstrations and resistance have an even greater role to play in holding governments accountable to their people. Minus such resistance, you write, “democracy is at risk of becoming stagnant, narrow and obsolete.” Based on your research, what might the future hold for public spaces continuing to feed democracy, and even equity and justice?

JH: The future of public space and democracy is contingent upon our actions. In the wake of the recent protests, there have already been measures for policing taken by authorities that are intended to discourage assemblies or actions that lead to large gatherings. Big data and advanced surveillance technology, including facial recognition can be mobilized for the purpose of policing as well.

Our ability in fighting against these practices will determine the future of our democracy. With public space playing such an important role for freedom of speech and assembly and for holding institutions accountable to the public, the fight for public space is also a fight for democracy that protects equity and justice around the world.

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For more information about Hou and his work, contact him at 206-543-7225 or jhou@uw.edu.