Urban Design

Former city housing commissioner Joe Mascia is set to lead a task force comprised of residents of the Marine Drive Apartments to study redevelopment opportunities and new governance models for the sprawling waterfront property. The objective of the effort is

With the Geometric Intelligence deal, Uber wants to make major advances in how the computers behind self-driving vehicles think and make decisions on the road. via Uber Bets on Artificial Intelligence With Acquisition and New Lab — NYT > Home Page

Niagara Falls State Park is the oldest in the nation, founded in 1885. It hosts just over nine million visitors annually and is among the most iconic natural monuments in North America. The state park itself is 221 acres and was

THE EDITORIAL BOARD   With talk of redeveloping the Old Central Terminal, which has been under the control of Hamilton developer Harry Stinson, who claims that he preparing the building for mixed use redevelopment. Skeptics site his unfilled promise to

BY FRANK PARLATO The New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) agreed last week to spend an unspecified sum of taxpayer money on a full and formal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to examine alternatives to maintaining the Buffalo Skyway. The

BY JIM OSTROWSKI The power elites who have run Buffalo into the ground for decades have largely squandered the greatest inland waterfront in the United States, ours.  Only in recent years has progress been made.  It is said that China builds the

THE EDITORIAL BOARD Developer Carl Paladino must step up the quality of his company’s proposals with respect to urban design. In recent months, Paladino has riled preservationists after a $75 million Ellicott Development proposal would have demolished a historic property at Pearl and Tupper

BY TONY FARINA The local construction company suing the state over its termination as the Canalside contractor in July of 2013 has won a major victory in the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling handed down

BY JAMES HUFNAGEL It couldn’t have been made any clearer had it been posted on billboards, shouted from rooftops or written in skywriting. If there was ever the shadow of a doubt in your mind that the south Robert Moses

Congressman Brian Higgins is urging the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority to spend over $40 million to redevelop the DL&W Terminal into a light rail station. The controversial publisher Matthew Ricchiazzi, a Cornell trained urban planner, is calling Higgins’ plan “another ignorant

The Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority is considering two alternatives in its planning of an extension of the light rail system to the the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino and the future site of an anticipated Buffalo  Bills Stadium. The first —

Buffalo Rising, the city’s leading publication on architecture and development and something of a digital town square for the body politic, has erupted with criticism after the unveiling of a $75 million project being proposed by Carl Paladino’s Ellicott Development. The

County legislator Lynne Dixon (I-Hamburg) is rallying the community against the State Department of Environmental Conservation’s plan to only partially clean up the former Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna. The Cuomo administration plan calls for excavating contaminants, but the relocating

We don’t pay enough attention to the impact that sounds can have as a place making urban design tactic. Sound can have — like the smell of Cheerios baking or the subtle scent of seaweed in a lakefront breeze —

The Blackrock and Riverside sections of Buffalo could be nationally renowned neighborhoods with an extraordinary quality of life. But rather than securing a gorgeous waterfront as public space, we have allowed a massive interstate to sever the city from it’s waterfront,

One of the most profound urban design mistakes in Buffalo’s history has been our treatment of Scajaquada Creek. In Black Rock, the creek winds though industrial brownfeilds and functions as a sewage ditch — with all of the runoff pollutants from

High quality public spaces can be a deeply democratizing force in the urban context. Historically, public spaces — particularly in the form of town squares — have been where civic life occurs. Those spaces act a critical venue for the governance

Contrary to the prevailing discourse that mass transit is an unending money pit that should be avoided, now is the time we should be aggressively building out our light rail system. It will catalyze a real estate investment and construction