BAED graduate to implement award-winning studio project

Ya'Ukuu, who earned a BA in Environmental Design in 2025 and is now enrolled in the Master of Urban Planning program, was recently presented with a UB Excellence in Research, Scholarship, & Creativity Award for their proposal, “Informal Social Infrastructure in Downtown Buffalo, NY,” a community-driven design initiative showing how residents can transform unused parking lots into inclusive public gathering places.

The project was developed for the BAED capstone studio in Fall 2025 under the direction of Assistant Professor Xuanyi Nie.

The project will activate two underused parking lots on Main Street in downtown Buffalo, along the edges of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, as a flexible, seasonal plaza for food, art and retail vendors, and a “space for accessible, equitable public gathering.”

Ya'Ukuu's proposal focuses on the transformative power of “informal social infrastructure,” or the everyday ways people collectively use, manage, and care for shared space, particularly in places shaped by disinvestment. Rather than just an abstraction, Ya’Ukuu argues that organized social capital can serve as functional infrastructure. “When planners recognize and support these informal systems, they can design spaces that strengthen cooperation rather than disrupt it.”

The plaza would be anchored by East Side Stewards, a community organization and workers co-op mobilizing community-led revitalization on Buffalo’s East Side that Ya’Ukuu co-founded in 2024 to promote ecological justice through the transformation of unbuilt lots into vibrant, sustainable spaces.

A native of The Bronx in New York City, Ya’Ukuu says their passion for social justice formed early in life. “I was given early insight into what decades of disinvestment, redlining, environmental degradation, and urban renewal actually look like on the ground, as the conditions of daily life for the people around me. The Bronx shaped my understanding that neighborhood decline is never accidental; it is the accumulated result of deliberate policy choices that concentrate poverty, strip resources, and then blame communities for the outcomes.”

“That foundation made me deeply attuned to the pattern when I encountered Buffalo's East Side, a geography carrying a remarkably similar history of racialized disinvestment, highway fragmentation, and municipal neglect,” Ya'Ukuu says.

“East Side Stewards emerged from a conviction that the people who have remained in those neighborhoods, who have held them together through decades of abandonment, deserve to be centered as the architects of what comes next. The organization was built on the belief that stewardship is not a charitable act but an inherently political one.”

In just over a year, the organization has already revitalized several vacant or underused lots on the East Side into stewarded green spaces that host community connection and facilitate green workforce development and food distribution. Its commons-based governance model promotes vendor participation, youth stewardship and community feedback across a multi-sectoral network.

“2025 was a year of deepening roots and expanding reach," Ya'Ukuu says. "Across three active stewardship sites, CAgrO Urban Farm, CS53 Community Garden, and Bailey-Dartmouth Memorial Garden, we are demonstrating that land held by community is land that works for community, producing food, building intergenerational connection, and anchoring a broader vision of East Side self-determination that extends well beyond any single site.”

East Side Stewards also leads youth and young adult programming and has begun hosting community events, listening sessions, and research and policy analysis efforts to directly engage residents and inform action across the diverse neighborhoods of the East Side. “We are deliberately expanding our network of organizational partners, working to position East Side Stewards at the intersection of land stewardship, community self-determination, arts integration, and food access in ways that make us a connector across sectors rather than an isolated program,” Ya'Ukku says. 

Ya'Ukuu adds that UB’s urban planning program has helped to mobilize their convictions into action through its focus on equity and balance of theory and critical practice.

“What stands out most about UB's MUP program is how intentional it is about centering equity, advocacy, and historical analysis as the foundational literacy that future planners need before they can responsibly engage with anything else," Ya'Ukuu says. "The program understands that planning has a history of harm and that preparing the next generation means building a deep capacity for empathy, environmental and climate consciousness, and genuine engagement with the communities that have most often been planned against rather than planned with.”

“I also appreciate that the program has shown a willingness to evolve its curriculum in response to real-time developments in the field and in the broader social and political landscape, which reflects an intellectual honesty about how rapidly the conditions planners are asked to navigate are shifting,” Ya'Ukuu says, adding that the program’s required community-based studios equip students with the practical skills needed in today’s profession.

“This is where students have to actually apply what they are learning in contexts that do not have clean answers. UB’s program is one that demands both rigor and humility, and that combination is exactly what this moment in urban planning requires,” says Ya’Ukuu.

Ya’Ukuu was presented with the award at this year’s Celebration of Student Academic Excellence ceremony on April 30, along with Master of Architecture student Ryan Bingham, who was selected for his overall portfolio. Thirteen other students from the School of Architecture and Planning were invited to present their work at the ceremony’s exhibition in Slee Hall on UB’s North Campus.