BUFFALO, N.Y. — Across the country, downtowns that once served as centers of commerce and recreation are plagued by quieter streets and buildings, fewer office workers and scattered retail establishments fighting to survive.

The conundrum goes beyond empty offices and struggling coffee shops and poses the  existential question: Who and what are downtowns for?

The University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning’s Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence will examine this question and others during a debate featuring top urban experts on Friday, Oct. 23.

The 2026 Rudy Bruner Debate on Urban Excellence will be held from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. at Seneca One Auditorium, 1 Seneca St., Buffalo. It’s free and open to the public, but advance registration is required through the Rudy Bruner event website.

Urban planners, retail experts, sociologists and civic leaders will share their thoughts and work toward solutions during three thematic sessions:

·       “Positioning Downtown,” 9:30-11:30 a.m., which looks at what downtown has been and whom it should serve

·       “Enlivening Downtown,” 1 to 3 p.m., which focuses on how streets, storefronts and public spaces make downtown sociable and active

·       “Transforming Downtowns,” 3:15-5:15 p.m., which examines what strategies can produce more inclusive, adaptable and durable downtowns.

“Downtown is not simply a Buffalo question,” said Julia Czerniak, professor of architecture and dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “Cities across the country are reconsidering assumptions that shaped downtown development for generations.”

Buffalo makes a particularly useful place to hold the conversation, however. Like many older American cities, it has seen its downtown pass through periods of growth, disinvestment and reinvention.

“The City of Buffalo has provided important leadership in that continuing reinvention, advancing major public investments and working with public, civic and private partners to strengthen downtown and reconnect it to surrounding neighborhoods and the waterfront,” said Robert Shibley, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Architecture and founding director of the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence.

“Today, downtown combines that public leadership with substantial private investment, adaptive reuse, new housing, cultural and entertainment destinations, transit and waterfront development – even as many of the questions confronting downtowns nationally remain unresolved.”

Getting people to see downtown as an attractive destination is one of those conundrums, especially at a time when fewer employees have returned to the office full time, following the pandemic, noted Conrad Kickert, associate professor of urban design and director of programs at the Rudy Bruner Center. He will serve as a moderator of the debate.

“With fewer office workers, downtowns are missing the people who bought lunch or a drink at the end of the day,” Kickert said. “Downtowns should be more than office parks. They should be places to shop, live, eat and socialize. And in Buffalo, there’s a new administration that’s really thinking of where downtown is headed next.”

Participants in this year’s debate cover the gamut of downtown thought leadership.

They include Elijah Anderson, Yale University sociologist and leading urban ethnographer; Karen Chapple, director of the University of Toronto School of Cities and leader of the Downtown Recovery research project; Lynne Sagalyn, Columbia University real estate scholar and author of “Downtown, Inc.”; Alex Krieger, Harvard University urban designer; Carol Ross Barney, architect and recipient of the 2023 AIA Gold Medal and designer of the Chicago Riverwalk.

Also participating are Bobby Boone, founder of AndAccess and specialist in equitable retail development; Carol Coletta, Bloomberg Public Innovation Fellow at Johns Hopkins University; Thomas Fisher, director of the Minnesota Design Center; Vikas Mehta, University of Cincinnati scholar of public space and urban social life; Larisa Ortiz, managing director at Streetsense and specialist in downtown retail and development; and Stephen Paynter, a Gensler principal known for his work on converting downtown office buildings to residential use.

The debate is the second biennial event produced by the Bruner center. In 2024, it sponsored a similar debate on place that led to the open-access book “Place and Placemaking,” which was recently released. The upcoming debate is under contract to result in a similar book.

Kickert said the concept for these debates is not an echo chamber or a monologue on the participants’ latest work, but rather an opportunity to exchange ideas – and in some cases, disagree, in order to move toward solutions.

“This also isn’t about tips and tricks,” he said. “We’re not going to say, ‘If you do this, and this and this, your downtown is going to come back to life.’ This is a reflection on who we are, where we’ve been and where we’re headed.”

The current debate also serves as one of the Bruner center’s contributions to Queen City Hub Revisited, a Buffalo initiative that is bringing public, civic, business, development and transportation organizations together around the future of downtown, Shibley noted.

“Our task for the Queen City Hub Revisited is not to start over,” Shibley said.

“Together, the many consortium participants are looking at how to build on completed plans, strengthen work that is under way and address areas where additional planning is needed. All this while we move from plans to action – with stronger advocacy, new financing tools, a public dashboard that shows whether we are making progress, and better ways to engage the public in decisions about downtown’s future.”

In addition to the Rudy Bruner Center, participants in the consortium include the City of Buffalo, Erie County, Buffalo Urban Development Corporation, Buffalo Place Inc., Greater Buffalo Niagara Regional Transportation Council,  Buffalo Niagara Partnership, Invest Buffalo Niagara, Visit Buffalo Niagara, Urban Land Institute, Downtown 2030, NAIOP Commercial Real Estate Development Association, and the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority.