On September 29, we celebrated the launch of the new book, We Own The City: Enabling Community Practice in Architecture and Urban Planning, with a resourceful panel discussion at TrimLab.

The editor Francesca Miazzo, Manufacture New York CSO Rob Sanchez and NYCHA Garden and Greening Manager Lee Trotman were joined by Design Trust Executive director Susan Chin to brainstorm about different models of inclusive urban development. An active Q&A session enriched the evening’s conversation.

Francesca highlighted the vital role of identifying a community:

“A starting point is realizing how you define community and how this definition may be different than others. Sometimes the hardest part of a project is just this. 

Architecture is a perfect example of how projects fail when you don't know the community you are building for. Vacancy is a problem because partially because big projects are imposed and the surrounding context is not considered.”