Shaping the City Forum – Housing and Community for a Shared Future

By Lucia Pedrana, Hadi El Hage, Juan Camilo Osorio, Gita Nandan, Zehra Kuz, and Leonel Ponce

"Following the 2025 edition of Shaping the City Forum – Housing and Community for a Shared Future in Venice curated by the European Cultural Centre, this panel during the Pratt Research Open House extended the conversation from Venice to New York City. The session presented key insights and the 15 Lessons Learned from the Shaping the City Manifesto, opening them up to dialogue with faculty from Pratt Institute and New York City practitioners and government representatives to explore how these principles resonate, translate, or transform within the context of New York City.

Housing today stands at the intersection of affordability crises, climate pressures, migration, and deepening inequality. The Venice forum framed housing not merely as shelter, but as care, as civic infrastructure, and as a collective project grounded in dignity and belonging.

This panel inviteed a new lens for reflection:

• How do these lessons operate in NYC’s highly financialized housing market?
• What forms of community-led practice, policy innovation, or design experimentation are emerging?
• And how might insights from New York expand and challenge the manifesto’s propositions?

The objective of this session was to extend the Venice dialogue into a new urban context, engaging Pratt faculty and practitioners in a critical exchange that reinterprets the manifesto’s lessons through the lens of New York City’s housing landscape."