Our Work

Explore the scholarly, curricular and creative work of our faculty and students as we mobilize our disciplines on today's most pressing societal challenges. Through studios, sponsored and independent research, faculty and students across our programs engage with real-world projects that reimagine our built environment, innovate modes of practice and transform communities both locally and globally.

Our approach to research

Intersight, our journal of student work

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  • Historic preservation studio informs major East Side development, wins planning award
    7/5/23
    A recent urban planning studio at UB has generated critical insights on alternative approaches to historic preservation for marginalized communities, receiving the attention of the professional planning community and directly informing an adaptive reuse project under way on Buffalo’s East Side.
  • Rooting Resilience: Planning for the future of urban agriculture in Buffalo, New York
    8/1/21

    Lanika Sanders, a 2021 graduate of the Master of Urban Planning program, was recognized with the MUP Best Professional Project for her research on Buffalo’s urban agriculture landscape, synthesizing existing plans and policies to highlight opportunities for enhancement of Buffalo's agricultural capacity.

  • Methods in Preservation
    12/1/20
    This course introduces students to the basic guidelines, standards, research methods, and documentation techniques used in historic preservation to identify and record historic structures and sites. These kinds of research techniques explored by students included the development of site descriptions, creating historical narratives, reviewing existing scholarly and/or professional literature, collecting primary and secondary data, developing skills in architectural photography, and understanding the basics of documenting and analyzing historic material fabric. The course makes use of lectures, discussions, and fieldwork to introduce the various ways in which preservationists document historic sites and resources.
  • Villusion
    12/1/20
    This short film was created using the zoom interface by two students studying on different continents. Miguel Ortiz-Teed, working in Buffalo, and Yogesh Ravichandar, working in India, wanted to examine and express the specific difficulties of personal interaction in the video-conference environment.
  • Neighborhood Walk
    12/1/20
    This project invited urban planning students to plan and carry out a walk through a neighborhood of their choice. Their walking route needed to be safely navigable as a pedestrian and between .5 and 1 mile in length (around a half hour walk).
  • People & Place
    12/1/20
    Willert Park Courts (WPC), known today as A.D. Price Homes, is currently a vacant residential housing complex made up of ten buildings located in the Ellicott District of the east side of Buffalo, New York.
  • Near-Term Strategies for the Northland Campus
    12/1/20
    For decades, the area around Northland Avenue suffered from divestment and abandonment, especially as many of its former manufacturing anchors succumbed to outside economic forces. Due to the adjacent Belt Line railroad, the corridor had become a strategic industrial hub able to move both people and products en masse. Once home to manufacturers such as Houdaille Industries, Otis Elevator Company, Curtiss-Wright Corporation, Northland Rubber Company, and Niagara Machine & Tool Works (later Clearing Niagara), the products that left the loading docks went on to forge modern America. A blue-collar workforce, building aircraft engines, plunger elevators, and automobile parts, established residency near their employers starting around the turn of the 20th Century. Over time, this pattern of settlement formed the Delavan Grider neighborhood we know today.
  • The Northeast Greenway Initiative
    5/20/20

    A graduate-level studio engaged the neighborhood surrounding UB's South Campus in exploring the possibilities for extending a critical rails-to-trails greenway. This one-mile trail, called the Northeast Greenway, would be a much needed link in Buffalo’s trail network connecting the existing North Buffalo and Tonawanda Rails to Trails to the East Side.  

  • Feasibility Assessment of an Innovation District in Buffalo
    5/20/20
    In the pursuit of creative and contemporary economic development strategies, a group of leaders in Western New York identified an innovation district (ID) as an important potential resource for our region. This term describes urban neighborhood-scale geographic places where a new economy combines high-tech businesses and institutions within a collaborative built environment that is conducive to living, working and playing. The original nomenclature was established by Julie Wagner and Bruce Katz as part of a series of Brookings Institute publications.
  • Board and Batten: The legacy of Kirkbride and the therapeutic landscape
    5/20/20
    Students in this graduate preservation planning studio, directed by clinical associate professor of planning Kerry Traynor, completed an adaptive reuse proposal for a 19th-century barn located on the historic Richardson Olmsted Campus in Buffalo.
  • Post-industrial housing: An affordable housing opportunity for post-industrial cities
    5/20/20
    Cities grappling with limited supplies of high-quality, affordable homes are exploring alternatives in housing policy and form. This graduate-level studio in the Master of Urban Planning program explores the potential for manufactured housing in Buffalo and post-industrial cities more broadly.
  • Regional economic development & equity assessment for Buffalo, New York
    5/20/20
    A graduate-level studio directed by associate professor of urban planning Jiyoung Park, PhD, This study is focused on investigating economic development opportunities for four cities along the New York State I-90 corridor; Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. 
  • Scajaquada Creek: The Existing Conditions & The Future
    5/20/20
    This graduate-level studio in the Master of Urban Planning program explores the Scajaquada Creek and its potential for development as a cultural and ecological asset for the City of Buffalo.
  • Restoring Scajaquada Creek
    5/1/20

    Architecture and urban planning students in a joint urban design studio explored redevelopment solutions for the Scajaquada Creek corridor and opportunities to integrate the natural and surrounding built contexts to boost public health. 

  • Regional Economic Development & Equity
    5/1/20
    This study focused on investigating economic development opportunities for four cities along the New York State I-90 corridor: Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Albany. 
  • Manufactured Housing
    5/1/20
    The affordability of housing has become a critical problem in most of the United States, especially in large, fast-growing cities where there are shortages of vacant land and housing. Post-industrial cities also face severe housing affordability problems due to population loss and deindustrialization, even though vacant land and abandoned houses are common. These “shrinking” or “legacy” cities face problems of low incomes, combined with surplus housing stock that has deteriorated to the point where it is no longer economical to rehabilitate it. The purpose of this report is to propose a unique opportunity for meeting the affordable housing needs of residents in post-industrial cities.
  • Smart Mobility
    5/20/19
    The following report on the applicability of various smart mobilities for the Buffalo-Niagara region is a synthesis of the full findings produced by the spring 2019 Masters of Urban Planning Studio Practicum led by Professor Bumjoon Kang, PhD in collaboration with the Greater Buffalo-Niagara Regional Transportation Council (GBNRTC). The emerging technologies that are quickly transforming the transportation systems of cities worldwide are considered in this report in an effort to present local transportation planning professionals with a framework for implementing these technologies in the Buffalo-Niagara region. 
  • Stars align on Eastern Hills redesign
    3/15/19

    With the project in its early stages, UB architecture and urban design students were able to offer their own ideas for redeveloping the mall in Clarence.

  • Are We There Yet?
    12/1/18
    This study examines patterns of growth and development on Niagara Falls Boulevard. Surveying major portions of the Boulevard and documenting trends, students engaged with maps, city directories, and other sources to locate areas with extant structures and analyze precedents that dealt with similar circumstances.
  • Harrison Place
    6/1/18
    In Spring 2018, a multidisciplinary graduate studio in architecture and planning conducted a reuse study of the former Harrison Radiator facility, currently know as Harrison Place, located in Lockport, NY.
  • Winter Storm Vulnerability
    6/1/18
    Juweria Dahir
    William Siegner
    Tom Voigt
  • Elevator B
    5/30/12
    Elevator B is a 22 -foot-tall, free-standing steel, glass and cypress tower that was raised in "Silo City," an area along the Buffalo River where several massive abandoned grain elevators are located. The bee colony that now inhabits the tower was living in the walls of a long unused outbuilding destined for rehabilitation.