Awards & Honors

Prof. Laura Wainer is to participate in the newly created Urban Design Forum Global Exchange. The fellowship, themed “Big Swings,” will build bridges between leaders in New York and other cities taking “big swings” at their housing crises.

Born in Argentina, Wainer is known for her academic work on the intersection between housing policy, design politics, and urban governance. She concentrates on housing inequality among migrants in NYC and the nine-month Fellowship dovetails perfectly with her work.

She is one of 40 across design, development, policy, law, advocacy, and journalism invited to liaise between New York City and the peer cities, seeking out cutting-edge projects for inspiration to hard-won lessons.

At the Spitzer School, Wainer is developing a seed project, “Mi Casa, Mi Futuro,” collaborating with Make the Road New York (MRNY), the largest community-based organization representing immigrants and working-class people of color in New York State. Part of a wider initiative to foster innovation and creative solutions in housing, over the past two years, Wainer’s students have conducted research and developed demonstration projects on alternative housing models, challenging conventional views on housing, land, and migration in the city. They received funding from CCNY’s Experiential Learning Office (ELO) to produce a publication that serves as an advocacy tool for MRNY to establish a Social Housing Program. The publication is set to be released in Sept. 2024.

As part of the wider initiative, the Fellowship will help Wainer develop a model of community engagement in architecture by integrating local knowledge and bridging the gap between academia, communities, and architectural practice; building capacity for civic leadership by strengthening the skills and abilities of future architects engaged in social well-being and housing justice; and consolidating a research agenda by amplifying the immigrant perspective in public housing debates and reshaping the discourse on housing equity.

Wainer holds a Ph.D. specializing in Urban Sociology from the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a fellow in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies in 2016. She earned a master’s degree through a Fulbright Scholarship in International Development from The New School and holds a dual B.A. in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Buenos Aires. She taught at MIT for seven years and has also taught at Harvard and The New School.

Wainer comes to CCNY with much international experience, having taught at the University of Cape Town, Buenos Aires University, and Di Tella University. In Argentina, Laura co-founded the Colectivo Urbano, an interdisciplinary group of practitioners and academics dedicated to providing design and planning solutions to underserved municipalities in the country.

She has consulted for IGC at Oxford University, Habitat for Humanity, the World Bank, the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

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Thea Klapwald
e: tklapwald@ccny.cuny.edu