His work has focused on community design, design activism, and democracy and contemporary urbanism, with an emphasis on engaging marginalized social groups in the making of place. In a career that spans across the Pacific, he has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers and fishermen in Taiwan, neighborhood residents in Japan, villagers in China, and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, in projects ranging from conservation of wildlife habitats and rebuilding of indigenous villages to the design of urban open space and streetscapes.

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Hou has written extensively on design activism and bottom-up placemaking. He is the editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010) and the forthcoming book Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking (2013). He is also co-author of Growing Cities, Greening Community: Learning from Seattle’s Urban Community Gardens (2009). He has written for several books, including Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (2008), Companion to Urban Design (2011), Service-Learning in Design and Planning: Educating at the Boundaries (2011), Beyond Zuccotti Park: Freedom of Assembly and the Occupation of Public Spaces (2012), The Emerging Asian City: Concomitant Urbanities and Urbanisms (2012), and a forthcoming book The Informal City. He is the recipient of the Places Book Award in 2010 and 2012 for Greening Cities, Growing Communities and Insurgent Public Space.

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Hou currently serves on the national board of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR) and co-chairs the advisory committee for IDEA Space, a community design and resource center in Seattle’s International District. He is also a co-founder of the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, established in Berkeley in 1998. Hou received his PhD in Environmental Planning and M Arch from University of California, Berkeley, MLA from University of Pennsylvania, and B Arch from the Cooper Union.