What Do 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.

UB Center for Urban Studies Assistant Director, Jeff Kujawa, listens to a resident voice their concerns and ideas during a focus group meeting while a student takes notes.

What Drives Our Work?

We seek to build a world, including the United States of America, where African Americans and people of color will live in dignity, control their lives, and realize their full human potential. Such a free and liberated society will be inclusive and equitable, and based on social, racial, economic, cultural and political justice. Participatory democracy will be the anchor. Thus, we seek to understand the world so that we can change it.