After more than a century of heroic visions for utopian cities, urban dwellers today live in suburban subdivisions, gated communities, edge cities, and slums. While some cities are shrinking, others continue to grow rapidly, spurring migration and expanding ecological footprints. Faced with the uncertainty created by challenges such as climate change, political unrest, and economic stagnation, these processes and dynamics are likely to continue. In recent decades, a significant body of discourse on urban futures has emerged offering discrete visions of future cities and alternative processes for city making. Building on the work of tactical urbanism, spontaneous interventions, and insurgency, we call for integrating critical inquiries and immediate and substantive actions through a discourse of Now Urbanism. The urbanism of Now recognizes the rich complexities of the present city not as barriers or obstacles but as grounds for uncovering opportunity and unleashing potential. It asserts that the future city is already here, in terms of its assets and capacity. It views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the present city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers. We propose a framework of situating, grounding, performing, and instigating that addresses the specificity, context, agency, and actions in the re-making of the contemporary city.

Jeffrey Hou is associate Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on community design, design activism, critical urbanism, and placemaking by marginalized social groups. He is City of Vienna Visiting Professor 2013 (Senior), teaching at SKuOR - Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space. Jeffrey Hou is the editor of Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (2013) and Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010). He is also a co-editor of Now Urbanism: the Future City is Here, to be released in 2014.