The Austrian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on housing. Curators Michael Obrist, Sabine Pollak, and Lorenzo Romito contrast the top-down model of social housing construction in Vienna with the bottom-up model of self-organization in Rome’s civil society.

What can a system organized at state or municipal level learn from an approach based on informal activism, and vice versa? Could a synthesis of the two models perhaps be a starting point for overcoming the acute lack of affordable housing in our cities? And what does good housing and a better life involve today anyway?

In this accompanying issue of ARCH+, the developments in Vienna and Rome are discussed in essays, discussion formats, and numerous infographics.

The Austrian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale focuses on housing. Curators Michael Obrist, Sabine Pollak, and Lorenzo Romito contrast the top-down model of social housing construction in Vienna with the bottom-up model of self-organization in Rome’s civil society.

What can a system organized at state or municipal level learn from an approach based on informal activism, and vice versa? Could a synthesis of the two models perhaps be a starting point for overcoming the acute lack of affordable housing in our cities? And what does good housing and a better life involve today anyway?

In this accompanying issue of ARCH+, the developments in Vienna and Rome are discussed in essays, discussion formats, and numerous infographics.