Urban & Regional Planning News
09.05.08 Ferdinand Lewis, Ph.D., Joins Faculty
Dr. Ferdinand Lewis has joined the Department of Urban and Regional Planning as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In August of 2008, Ferdinand Lewis became the first recipient of the interdisciplinary degree in Policy, Planning and Development from the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development. While at USC, Lewis served on the adjunct faculty of the School of Fine Art’s Public Art Studies program, teaching a two-semester sequence on art as community engagement. For USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, Lewis taught courses in qualitative research methods and urban morphology, and he also taught community design and development in USC’s interdisciplinary Neighborhood Studies Program.
Prior to taking up his doctoral studies, Lewis served on the faculties of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program and the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts for a decade. He has authored numerous articles, two books, and a book chapter on the subjects of ensemble theater, community-based artmaking, and graphic design.
After the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Lewis (a South Louisiana native) participated in the development of “Preface to a Plan,” a web-based, post-disaster urban design project, which won two American Planning Association awards, and was exhibited at the 2006 Venice Biennale.
Lewis’s current research focuses on the ethics of urban design, specifically on how designers evaluate the built environment’s contribution to human well being.
09.01.08 Faculty Member Receives Tenure
The Urban and Regional Planning Department is pleased to announce that Professor Daniel B. Hess, Ph.D., was granted a promotion to Associate Professor with tenure effective with the start of the fall semester, 2008.
08.30.08 UP Students Travel to England
Six MUP students participated in a study abroad course led by Dr. Daniel B. Hess in England in August 2008. During the course, students were in residence in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape at Newcastle University. Through interactions with Newcastle University faculty and planning professionals from the Newcastle Gateshead region, the students investigated urban regeneration, arts development, waterfront planning, and city-university interactions. Beyond the city of Newcastle, students visited Durham cathedral and various coal mining towns in Northeast England. The region provided fertile design and policy actions for comparative study of urban planning in the US Rustbelt.
08.01.08 Planning Faculty Member Honored
Samina Raja, Ph.D., has been named a member of Business First’s "40 Under Forty" 2008 class which recognizes honorees for their professional success and commitment to the community. Dr. Raja’s research focuses on planning and design for healthy communities. Her recent article, "Beyond Food Deserts: Measuring and Mapping Racial Disparities in Neighborhood Food Environments," in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (Vol. 7, issue 4) examines racial disparities and access to healthy food. In the study, Dr. Raja notes that minority neighborhoods are more likely to be “food deserts,” meaning they suffer from a lack of availability of healthy, nutritious food. Rather than large grocery stores, she points out that minority neighborhoods are often served by a network of smaller independent corner stores. In her work with the Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP), Dr. Raja is helping make Buffalo a healthier city by improving access to healthy food. MAP is creating urban gardens and training youth in sustainable food systems. Buffalo Grown Mobile Marketplace, her latest community-economic-development initiative, will help provide food deserts in East and West Buffalo with access to healthy, nutritious food through the use of mobile markets which will strengthen the food system by bringing locally-grown food directly to underserved communities. She is also continuing work on an NIH-funded collaborative study that examines the influence of the food and built environments on obesity and physical activity. Jack Connors, Business First publisher and president stated "our community is fortunate to have these 40 individuals active and involved.”
08.01.08 Clarkson Week Announced
In October 2008 the University at Buffalo Department of Urban and Regional Planning will continue its annual tradition of hosting the Clarkson Chair, a scholar-in-residence. Through a week-long series of public lectures and seminars, hosted on and off campus, the Clarkson week promotes interdisciplinary scholarship on a topic of current interest, and facilitates knowledge-sharing among academicians and local planning practitioners. The faculty of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning are delighted to announce that Dr. Michael Teitz, professor emeritus of city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley, has been named the 2008 Clarkson Chair in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning.
Dr. Teitz is Director of the Economy Program, Senior Fellow, and former Director of Research at the Public Policy Institute of California, which he helped to plan and establish. He holds a B.Sc (Economics) from the London School of Economics, an M.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin, and a Ph.D. in Regional Science from the University of Pennsylvania. His recent research has been in the fields of regional planning, local economic development, and housing planning and policy. Author of a book on residential rent control and numerous papers and reports, Professor Teitz has served as a consultant and advisor to local, state, and national governments, both in the United States and Internationally, and to private sector and non-profit organizations. He has been chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning, chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate of the University of California, and president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. He has received the Berkeley Citation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Distinguished Educator Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning. Dr. Teitz will give the annual public Clarkson lecture on October29, 2008.
08.01.08 MUP Planning Program Reaccredited
The Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning reaccredited the Master of Urban Planning for six years. In a report released in spring 2008, the PAB praised the faculty, students, and program graduates on the regional, national, and international influence of their engaged scholarship. The PAB stated UB’s planning program benefits from “a dedicated faculty with high levels of experience and skill, blending theoretical and practical capabilities, enthusiastic and committed students, a supportive professional community; loyal alumni; location in a university with a strong professional education tradition that has invested in the program in recent years; and location in a school that sees urban and regional planning as central to its mission.” The report goes on to state that “employers and professional leaders describe the program graduates as very well prepared for a wide range of planning careers…Many alumni quickly rise to positions of leadership in the planning profession in Western New York and beyond.” Reaccreditation is effective through 2014.
08.01.08 New Faculty Member Appointed
JiYoung Park has been appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. He received a Ph.D. in urban planning from the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, the first university center of excellence funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He obtained both his B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics, summa cum laude from Seoul National University in Korea. As a student, he was involved in over ten research projects and has published or had accepted ten peer-reviewed papers, two econometrics textbooks, three book chapters, and prepared seven peer-reviewed papers. In 2006, Dr. Park received an SPPD dissertation fellowship. A recipient of the 2006 METRANS UTC outstanding student award from METRANS and the National PERISHIP award supported from the National Science Foundation, Swiss Re, The Public Entity Risk Institute and the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center. He was also awarded the Best Paper Prize in 2007 Graduate Paper Competition Using Statistical Data from Korea’s National Statistical Office. His dissertation received Honorable Mention of the 2007 Regional Science Association International (RSAI) Dissertation Competition and the Jack Dyckman Award for the Best Dissertation in Planning from University of Southern California in 2008. Dr. Park’s current research interests are urban economics and transportation modeling as applied to Natural and man-made environmental and security problems. As a research assistant at USC, he constructed the National Interstate Economic Model (NIEMO), a spatially disaggregated operational MRIO(Multiregional Input-Output) model of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. He also constructed a temporarily extended NIEMO, calling it FlexNIEMO. Currently, he is working on a new project, developing a methodology to combine NIEMO with model systems, funded by METRANS. He anticipates developing worldwide MRIO models, including NIEMO, which is called ICEMAP (Inter-Countries Economic Model of Asian Pacific rim). The economic and transportation models he developed were used to analyze economic impacts resulted from natural disasters such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and from hypothetical terrorist attacks on important transportation infrastructures in U.S. He is also developing and regionalizing those macro models to be more useful for local government.
08.01.08 Center for Urban Studies Cited for Outstanding Program Award
The Center for Urban Studies’ East Side Neighborhood Transformation Project (ESNTP) has been named the recipient of the 2008 International Community Development Society’s award for “outstanding program utilizing the principles of good practice as adopted by the society.” ESNTP seeks to aid in revitalizing the Fruit Belt and Martin Luther King, Jr. Park communities – two of Buffalo’s most distressed inner-city neighborhoods – by making them desirable places to live, work and raise a family. ESNTP involves interactive projects that link K-8 education with housing rehabilitation and commercial corridor revitalization by involving students in neighborhood planning and improvement. ESNTP works with community-based organizations to assist them in meeting the affordable-housing needs of the community. The program also works with local businesses and the Fillmore Avenue Merchants Association to improve the physical environment and safety of the business corridor, as well as provide business owners training and improved access to capital. The program is supported with a grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development.
01.28.08 Study Abroad Program Wins Award
The Department of Urban and Regional Planning’s international comparative studio in Stuttgart, Germany and Buffalo, NY has been cited a ‘best practice’ in study abroad and honorable mention for the prestigious Andrew Heiskell Award, conferred by the Institute of International Education. The studio is designed to offer a new model of collaboration for students, research opportunities for faculty and broaden understanding of Buffalo’s significance as a world city. Fifteen MUP students from UB joined 12 German students to collaborate on projects in both Buffalo and Stuttgart under the direction of Professors Wolfgang Jung, Walter Schönwandt, Niraj Verma and William Page. View Full Story
01.28.08 URP Student Newsletter
The Urban and Regional Planning student newsletter is now available online.
