Rebuilding Buffalo on Active Hope

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REBUILDING BUFFALO ON ACTIVE HOPE

by Robert G. Shibley, FAIA, FAICP Dean and SUNY Distinguished Professor School of Architecture and Planning, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

Cast into the national spotlight by the events of May 14, 2022, Buffalo’s East Side is ground zero for innovative practices in just city-making led by a coalition of citizens, scholars and future architects and planners at UB. Photo courtesy of East Side Avenues/UB Regional Institute

Since our founding 50 years ago, the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning has created the conditions for hope through acts of citizen-driven planning, design and building across the city that hosts us. In grounding our teaching and research in the aspirations of our community and a shared affection for place, we rebuild our city, improve life for its citizens, and drive innovations in design and planning that scale up to cities around the world and into the professions we serve. On May 14, 2022, a horrific act of racist hate sent shockwaves through our city, and we were reminded just how far we have to go—as a society, as a city, and as a profession. The mass shooting at a grocery store in East Buffalo was the collision of an acute act of violence with an equally insidious legacy system of segregation in our cities that isolates, neglects and harms segments of the population along the lines of race. East Buffalo, where 80 percent of Buffalo’s Black population resides, has suffered decades of disinvestment. The systems of inequity are so deeply embedded that over the past three decades the city’s Black community has seen little progress (and in some cases none at all) on key indicators of quality of life—from income and educational attainment to homeownership and health outcomes. As a community of educators, scholars and practitioners in the built environment professions, we grieve the loss of life, the trauma inflicted upon our city, and the shortcomings of society in addressing the entrenched injustices of racism. May 14 calls attention—yet again—to the challenge of our time—rebuilding our cities as places where all have the opportunity for life lived well. The imperative, and opportunity, before us is to dig in, and bring our whole selves to action on behalf of justice in our city. Buffalo and its East Side is ground zero for more just ways of living, and a lever of change for all cities. Drawing upon the guidance of climate activist Joanna Macy and psychologist Chris Johnstone, it is here where we come with gratitude to

Students in a graduate architecture studio visit Buffalo Go Green on the East Side for a design-build project that will help the nonprofit expand its urban farm operation. Photo courtesy of Buffalo Go Green

Citizen activist and Master of Urban Planning student Jalonda Hill (third from right) with members of Colored Girls Bike Too. She enrolled in our Citizen Planning School to advance a project that rebuilds the East Side through mobility justice. Photo courtesy of Rise Collaborative

teach and practice “active hope” with the people of Buffalo – project by project, increment by increment, year over year. Today, this active hope continues to lift up a new wave of design and planning innovations across the urban landscapes of Buffalo’s East Side, focused squarely on the needs and aspirations of our most vulnerable citizens. The process of learning with our community turns ideas into action while building capacity among citizens and our students—future architects, planners and developers—for the long-term work of equitable placemaking. Consider that the coalition of Black-led community organizations mobilizing the delivery of food and services in the aftermath of the shooting are the same organizations partnering with our Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (Food Lab) to address conditions of food apartheid on Buffalo’s East Side. One of those organizations is Buffalo Go Green (BGG), an urban farm, mobile produce network and wellness education program that’s now expanding its operation into a Holistic Wellness and Agricultural Education Campus. The Food Lab is providing research support and helping BGG grow its training program for neighborhood youth and future food system workers from underserved populations. The nonprofit is also part of a national grant to our Food Lab that will translate the work of Buffalo’s urban farmers of color into best practices for communities around the world. That same grant is supporting a graduate architecture studio’s design-build of a 150-foot fence that will enclose five vacant lots for BGG’s new greenhouses and engage the community with features for public art, planting and seating. Just down the street from BGG’s headquarters, an architecture and urban design studio is working with neighborhood residents to transform a series of vacant lots into a mix of green space, housing and community services. The project builds off a decade-long master planning initiative for the neighborhood engaging multiple studios at the School of Architecture and Planning and the support of a local business hoping to improve the surrounding community.

UB Master of Architecture student Chenhui Yang’s proposal for “Bailey Commons” on the East Side integrates daycare, affordable live-work apartments, a playground and community gardens. It’s part of a series of proposals co-designed with the community now moving into the first phase of construction.

The 2021 cohort of East Side Avenues’ Community-Based Real Estate Training program, which aims to keep external investment in the hands of residents and businesses through capacity-building in real estate development. Photo courtesy of UB Reginal Institute

For the past decade, our award-winning Citizen Planning School has mobilized dozens of citizen activists across Buffalo with the tools of urban planning and design. Among its most recent graduates is former East Side resident and UB Master of Urban Planning student Jalonda Hill, founder of Colored Girls

Henry-Louis Taylor Jr. (center), UB professor of urban planning and associate director of the UB Community Health Equity Research Institute, leads UB medical and architecture and planning students on a recent tour of Buffalo’s East Side to talk with residents about health concerns in the community. Photo by Meredith Forrest Kulwicki

Bike Too (CGBT). She enrolled in the Citizen Planning School to help design her new project, the Holistic Mobility Hub, part of CGBT’s new Black Holistic Urbanism initiative focused on mobility justice. Hill is now prepared to launch a capital campaign for the mobility hub, which will include a bike shop, mobility bank, travel hub and just streets infrastructure design. The currents of active hope also flow through large-scale projects creating a framework of equitable development policy and practices on the East Side. East Side Avenues, led by our UB Regional Institute, has engaged hundreds of citizens and businesses, as well as an unprecedented coalition of Buffalo-based banks and foundations, to provide capacity-building and infrastructure supports that reinforce more than $200 million in New York State capital funds flowing into the East Side. Its Community-Based Real Estate Development Training program keeps those investments in the community by educating residents and building owners in commercial real estate development. Tapping the expertise of our master’s program in real estate development, the training initiative has graduated more than 30 students in its first two years with continued mentorship to support their development ideas. Meanwhile, the recent alignment of our Center for Urban Studies, a neighborhood planning group focused on the needs of traditionally marginalized groups, with UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute joins urban planners with UB medical students and scholars to address race-based health disparities on the East Side and across Buffalo. The movement toward justice on the East Side is reinforced by a critical mass of community-based research across our city – from an initiative to train Buffalo’s workforce in climate-resilient design and development, to an architecture studio that has developed “tiny home” affordable housing prototypes for cities across upstate New York. As the State University of New York’s only accredited graduate school of architecture and planning, situated in the premier public research university of the Northeast, we are uniquely positioned to move the needle on equity in the built environment for Buffalo. While we acknowledge we have miles to go, we stand up with the collaborative work in our communities in recognition that hope is not given, it is created. The call to action—for Buffalo, for cities like it, and for those who teach and practice our professions—is to root ourselves ever deeper in place and community and build the path to healing through active hope. l Learn more at archplan.buffalo.edu/RebuildingBuffalo

“The Harder We Run: The State of Black Buffalo in 1990 and the Present,” (2021), is a follow-up to a study prepared 31 years ago that aimed to determine how the city’s emerging knowledge-based economy impacted Buffalo’s Black community. Both studies were led by UB urban planning professor Henry-Louis Taylor Jr. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy, by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2012.

For more than 40 years, Bob Shibley has advanced evidence-based design excellence as a professor, scholar and practitioner of architecture and urban planning at the University at Buffalo. Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning since 2011, he joined UB in 1982 as professor and chair of architecture and was elevated to the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor in 2021. Over the past decade, Shibley has guided the School to a top-ranked position in research generation among schools of architecture and planning in the Association of American Universities. His leadership of citizen-driven planning in Buffalo has laid the foundation for the city’s resurgence and is a model for other city-regions throughout the world. In 1990, Shibley founded The Urban Design Project, a university center for the study and critical practice of urban design that developed an international award-winning ensemble of plans for the City of Buffalo’s downtown, waterfront and Olmsted park system, as well as its citywide comprehensive plan. He continues to advance this work through the UB Regional Institute, which aligned with the Urban Design Project in 2011 and today leads a new wave of regional planning efforts. Prior to his appointment as dean, Shibley led the development of UB 2020: The Comprehensive Physical Plan as a senior advisor to UB’s president. He is the author and co-author of 120 publications, including 17 books and 15 book chapters. In 2014, the American Institute of Architects awarded Shibley with the Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture.

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