WHO WE ARE
We are a research, neighborhood planning and community development institute devoted to building a just metropolis by eliminating neighborhood inequality and spatial injustice through the development of a neighborhood regeneration project that turns distressed urban places in communities of hope and opportunity. We are concerned with the transformation of distressed neighborhoods in shrinking cities and regions. We seek to understand these neighborhoods, cities and metropolitan regions in order to change them.
WHAT WE DO
We seek to build healthy communities and to create just cities and metropolitan regions. The intent is to build vibrant neighborhoods based on community control, participatory democracy, and cooperative economics that are anchored in people-centered urban centers based on social, economic, political, cultural and racial justice. To achieve this goal the UB Center for Urban Studies uses a prefigurative neighborhood planning strategy, engages in radical community development, and works with other groups and organizations to transform underdeveloped and marginalized neighborhoods into vibrant, healthy communities that are controlled by its residents.