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.

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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.
  • Students honored at UB's annual celebration of academic excellence
    6/19/23
    Two students from the School of Architecture and Planning were recognized with awards at UB's 2023 Celebration of Student Academic Excellence.
  • The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods Renaissance and Resurgence
    12/13/22
    This book sheds new light on the assumptions underlying neighborhood change.
  • Rust Belt Cosmopolitanism: Resettlement Urbanism in Buffalo, New York
    12/20/21

    Buffalo at the Crossroads is a collection of essays where twelve authors highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. Özay’s contribution reflects on the urban impacts of refugee resettlement in Buffalo, situating in the historic context of immigration and pluralism fostered by the city.

  • Planning Corruption or Corrupting Planning?
    12/1/21
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, and Wes Grooms, planning theorist, urban political economist and a visiting assistant professor of urban and regional planning, join forces with renowned authors  to better understand corruption and how it complicates planning. 
  • Evaluating users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor: Before and after a Complete Street project
    10/1/21

    The evaluation of users’ perceptions of a Main Street corridor was carried out through a post occupancy evaluation (POE) methodology was used to evaluate a Complete Street (CS) project and the findings highlight the need for outreach and evidence-based CS implementation.

  • 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.

  • Giga Shed Urbanism
    8/1/21

    Reid Hetzel (MArch '21) was recognized with the Design Excellence Award for his thesis, a reimagining of Buffalo's Tesla Gigafactory as civic space,

  • Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present
    1/14/21

    This volume of essays offers a welcome and long-awaited intervention for the field by shining a spotlight on constructions of race and their impact on architecture and theory in Europe and North America and across various global contexts since the eighteenth century.

  • Why being unable to hang out in cafes and bars drains our creativity
    12/22/20
    While the pandemic has caused thousands of small businesses to temporarily close or shutter for good, the disappearance of the corner coffee shop means more than lost wages.
  • Urban Life: Self + Society
    12/1/20
    In the Fall of 2020, students in the Senior class designed multiple-unit housing within the Bedford Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn, New York. The semester focused on the urban dwelling as a threshold between self and society, between local and global, and between nature and culture. This project aimed to develop connections in the student’s mind about context and developing systems of housing that would relate to a greater social, technical, cultural, political, and economic understanding of urban space.
  • 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.
  • Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore
    8/18/20

    Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore examines the role of the contemporary public school as an instrument of urban design. Bridging facets of urban design, development, and education policy, this book contributes to an expanded agenda for understanding the spatial implications of school-led redevelopment and school reform.

  • The digital life of the #migrantcaravan: Contextualizing Twitter as a spatialtechnology
    7/10/20
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, examines the relationship of spatial mapping and social media for migrant caravans in South America. 
  • Should architecturally significant low-income housing be preserved?
    7/9/20

    The recent demolition of the Paul Rudolph-designed Shoreline Apartments in Buffalo, NY, highlights one of the key tensions of preserving modern architecture: how to balance the needs of occupants with historically significant designs.

  • Black Spaces Matter
    6/25/20

    As the nation roils over its glaring inequities in racial justice, UB assistant professor of architecture Charles Davis II explores the historic connections of race and place in this contribution to the architectural history journal Aggregate.

  • The Border and the Market
    6/11/20

    Samendy Brice (MArch '20) has been awarded the 2019-20 ARCC King Medal, the Deptartment of Architecture's Thesis Prize, for her proposal of a border market as a structural element and condition of exchange along the contested border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

  • Student propsal for a border market along Haiti-Dominican Republic border wins this year's thesis prize for architecture
    6/11/20
    Samendy Brice (MArch '20) has been awarded the 2019-20 ARCC King Medal, the Deptartment of Architecture's Thesis Prize, for her proposal of a border market as a structural element and condition of exchange along the contested border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
  • Playing Against Type
    5/1/20
    The Spring 2020 Inclusive Design studio, Playing Against Type, was a critique on the typological thinking present in western architecture. Assistant Professor Charles Davis encouraged students to examine the reuse of European-inspired developer housing by the material customs of Black life on Buffalo’s East Side. It is understood within these investigations that the typological diagram of a building emulates the function of the cultural potentials of “primitive” peoples against the standards and norms of European civilization. 
  • 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.
  • Farming within a dual legal land system
    1/9/20
    Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, and Samina Raja professor of urban and regional planning, join James Sumberg in examining how Ghana’s dual legal land system affects urban farmers
  • Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style
    12/3/19
    Assistant professor of architecture Charles Davis II reveals the parallels between race and style in modern architecture.
  • Incubator
    12/1/19
    The Inclusive Design studio focused on developing a student oriented, small business incubator to foster creativity and entrepreneurism at UB. The designs were tailored to meet the needs of different “personas” for an imagined incubator design team through the use of inclusive strategies.