As part of the lecture International Planning Biennale 2025 - INTELLIGENS. NATURAL. ARTIFICIAL. COLLECTIVE., opens an external URL in a new window the excursion to Venice took place from 19 May to 21 May 2025. The excursion was organised by Kurt Weninger, opens an external URL in a new window and the teaching team also included Arthur Kanonier, opens an external URL in a new window, Barbarba Steinbrunner, opens an external URL in a new window and Madlyn Miessgang, opens an external URL in a new window. The focus was on the Biennale exhibition at the Giardinie and Arsenale site. The Austrian pavilion was visited on a separate guided tour. The concept of the Austrian pavilion ‘Agency for better living’, opens an external URL in a new window was created by a team of curators with the participation of the Vienna University of Technology. The pavilion deals with the issue of housing, which has always been understood in Vienna not as a purely functional issue, but as a socially emancipatory one. The Austrian contribution to the Biennale starts from this global interest in the Austrian model and establishes itself as an agency for better housing and living. Two parallel ‘mythical’ stories are told, with two opposing approaches to how we want to live together in the future: the story of the successful state or city-organised top-down model, illustrated by a hundred years of social housing planning in Vienna. And the history of informal housing, the bottom-up model, with the reuse of ruins, abandoned buildings and ex-infrastructures, exemplified in the Eternal City of Rome in the host country Italy, in which the great displacement mechanisms of the present are manifested as well as resistance, as if in a laboratory.