Rethinking design for resilient street environments, starting in Buffalo

Research shows that the way neighborhood streets are designed — and the materials that are used in public spaces — undermine efforts to combat the effects of climatic shifts 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 joined forces with the support of a two-year, $360,000 grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

Led by Lauren Ames Fischer, assistant professor in the Department of 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 was a graduate architecture studio titled “Streets as Urban Commons: Designing for Extreme Heat Resilience” and led by 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 and support from Fischer and Mohamed Aly Etman, director of the Building and Environmental Visualization Lab (BEVL).

In the studio, Stiphany and nine graduate architecture students examined 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 focused 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 developed 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 collected 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 says. “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.”

Stiphany explains, “The studio creates a pedagogical context to shift climate from an abstract issue to a situated and spatial one. Environmental 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 expanded 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 shifts in climate are experienced by people and built environments,” says Stiphany. “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.

While the spring 2026 studio 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 past 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, an alumnus of the school — 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 adds. “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 says, 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 ever-changing climate conditions. 

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 notes. 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 adds.

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,” she says. “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.”