Rethinking Design for Resilient Street Environments, Starting in Buffalo
Graduate students Jessica Renn and Juliet Leurs present The Living Loop to faculty, visiting critics, Buffalo residents, and representatives from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Kelly Sheldon May 22, 2026
Research shows that the way we design neighborhood streets—and the materials that we use in public spaces—undermine efforts to combat the effects of climate change in urban neighborhoods. While government officials largely recognize the need for change, practical barriers, such as logistical challenges and funding constraints, often prevent the implementation of solutions that could cool neighborhoods and strengthen long-term resilience.
To address this challenge, three research labs at the UB School of Architecture and Planning have joined forces with the support of a two-year $360,000 grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC). Led by Dr. Lauren Ames Fischer, assistant professor in urban and regional planning and research director of the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence, the project identifies effective strategies for reducing the local impacts of extreme heat and other climate-driven hazards and translates those strategies into a practical statewide guide to support implementation across the state. Embedded in this research partnership is a graduate architecture studio titled “Streets as Urban Commons: Designing for Extreme Heat Resilience.”
The two-course graduate studio sequence is being led by Dr. Kristine Stiphany, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and director of the Design for Resilient Environments Lab, in collaboration with adjunct instructor Jorge Ituarte Arreola, with support from Dr. Fischer and Dr. Mohamed Aly Etman, director of the Building and Environmental Visualization Lab (BEVL).
In the studio, Stiphany and nine graduate architecture students are examining a simple question: What does urban resilience look like in places that are not growing, not resourced, and not typically centered in design discourse? Their work focuses on the Fillmore corridor on Buffalo’s historically under-invested East Side, and five primary east-west streets that intersect it, each representing a distinct set of urban and climatic conditions. Along these intersecting streets, the students are developing scenarios for reconfiguring street right of way and adjacent parcels into integrated cooling streetscapes, collective housing, urban agriculture, and civic spaces for neighborhood residents.
Working with BEVL, the studio is collecting temperature and surface-shade data to evaluate how existing and proposed conditions can improve neighborhood heat resilience. “Our goal is to make climate adaptation tangible,” Etman said. “By visualizing heat, airflow, and shade in ways that are legible to planners, designers, and residents, we can support faster, better-informed decisions in a warming climate.”
Dr. Mohamed Aly Etman introduces students to tools for collecting temperature and surface-shade data used to evaluate heat impacts across existing and proposed conditions along Buffalo’s heat-vulnerable streets.
Stiphany explained, “The studio creates a pedagogical context to shift climate from an abstract issue to a situated and spatial one. Climate change becomes something that students can measure, draw, and ultimately attempt to redesign to the best of our capacity.”
Because architectural education often focuses on the scale of the individual building, the studio deliberately expands students’ understanding of urban systems and environmental relationships. “That shift is important for connecting them to the applied research that’s critical for the discipline of architecture and for future jobs that will ultimately impact how climate change is experienced by people and built environments,” Stiphany observed. “And it’s teaching them that climate adaptation of the built environment doesn’t just happen at the scale of one building. It happens through relationships between different systems.”
Over spring break, the students traveled to Albany to present their work to representatives from state agencies. Embracing these real-world stakes, they rose to the challenge and were so energized by the experience that they asked to repeat it for their final review.
Students synthesize field observations into corridor-scale spatial interventions through collective transect mapping along the Fillmore corridor.
While the Spring 2026 studio is centered on Buffalo’s East Side, the broader initiative is intended to serve as a model for climate adaptation across New York State. The mapping, fieldwork, and design strategies developed by students this semester will guide the project’s next phase, which expands into pilot communities across four climate regions: Coastal, Western New York, Central New York, and the Adirondacks. By working across these diverse contexts, the research team aims to develop flexible approaches to cooling, resilience, and neighborhood-scale adaptation that can support communities statewide.
Meanwhile, the Rudy Bruner Center—with research assistance from Christian Powell (END ’24, MUP ’26)—has been laying the groundwork for development of the statewide guide. With input from a statewide Technical Advisory Committee, the team is identifying the various barriers that prevent municipalities from implementing heat-mitigation strategies.
The work will culminate in the Streetscape Toolkit for Extreme Heat (STEH), a flexible design guide to help municipalities adapt to rising temperatures. Recognizing the budget limitations felt everywhere, but particularly in the most vulnerable communities, the STEH will be scalable in design, ensuring that everyone can find a way to use it.
Fischer emphasizes the project’s policy relevance, noting that “design alone doesn’t change cities. What this project does is translate environmental data and design research into replicable guidelines, so municipalities can find the solutions that best fit their needs and embed heat-resilient streets into zoning codes, comprehensive plans, and capital projects—where extreme heat is increasingly shaping how cities function.”
“I think the exciting thing about the design guide is it’s not intended to fix today’s problems,” Fischer added. “It’s really helping municipalities think about those challenges with climate that are going to show up in a decade or two or three, because this is the pace that infrastructure moves.”
Externally funded projects like this one, Fischer added, give students a rare opportunity to pursue questions their professors don’t yet have answers to. By working alongside practitioners and becoming subject-matter experts themselves, students have the agency to shape the direction of the studio and see how their ideas can lead to real-world implementation—an approach that’s central to Stiphany’s teaching philosophy. The goal is not just to produce a project but to develop a way of working within the ever-changing conditions of climate change.
Juliet Leurs shares transformable street models exploring alternative public-realm and climate-adaptation strategies with Leo Bachinger of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
Alexis Anderson discusses her proposal for The Civic Walk with longtime Buffalo resident Jad Cordes. The Fall 2026 studio will test strategies from this and related proposals in partner communities across New York State.
Another strength of the project lies in its interdisciplinary approach, bringing together architecture, planning, environmental analysis, and community engagement. “The problems that we’re trying to solve don’t stay within disciplinary boundaries,” Fischer noted. Through working in teams, students learn that climate adaptation requires coordinated efforts across multiple forms of expertise. “Students begin to realize that meaningful change in the 21st-century city depends on both interdisciplinary thinking and everyday collaboration,” Stiphany added.
In year two of the project, the research team will expand to include two more planning students, working together with a new cohort of architecture students. Working directly with community members, they will apply the methods developed this year in cities and towns across the state to inform the development of the STEH.
Ultimately, Stiphany hopes that this experience will help the students recognize their design agency. “The project establishes transformative opportunities for students to build skills for channeling critical perspectives of infrastructure into real-world strategies for increasing resilience in vulnerable communities. By organizing sequential research experiences, professional engagements, and public dissemination gatherings, the project mentors a new generation of interdisciplinary leaders in climate-engaged professional practice.”
