At Home and Abroad: Housing in Comparative Perspective was a Spring 2025 project-based course led by Professor Magda Maaoui. In collaboration with the Urban Design Forum, a New York-based organization, students from across disciplines set out to analyze local and international housing models and extract valuable lessons for addressing New York City’s ongoing housing crisis.

At Home and Abroad examined the diverse approaches to housing across cultural, political, and economic contexts. In a selection of cities across the globe, students learned from different housing systems, and understood how each one responded to local problems—and sometimes, created new ones. We inverted the usual lists of best practices, prioritizing traveling policies that moved from South to North, and took lessons from housing actors beyond the usual suspects.

The course was an opportunity to work in tandem with the New York-based organization the Urban Design Forum. Students were paired with groups of Forum fellows as they set out to analyze international housing models and extract valuable lessons for addressing New York City’s ongoing housing crisis. What makes New York a good laboratory for this inquiry? The scale of its housing crisis, paired with the relentless attempts at solving it.

Students engaged with a variety of case studies, policy transfer stories, and theoretical frameworks. They completed the course with an understanding of how housing solutions are influenced by local, national, and transnational conditions—and how, in turn, they shape the fate of cities.

This report can be read in full on issuu .