Urban Planner Yaro Named Clarkson Visiting Chair At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo will host design critic and acclaimed urban and regional planner Robert D. Yaro as the school's 1998 William and Elisabeth Clarkson Visiting Chair.

Yaro will deliver a lecture, titled "Metropolitan Planning in a New Century," at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 25, in 105 Harriman Hall on the UB South (Main Street) Campus as part of the school's Spring 1998 lecture series. The lecture will be free and open to the public.

Yaro serves as the executive director of the Regional Plan Association, America's oldest and most distinguished independent metropolitan research and advocacy group. In 1996, he co-authored the plan's final report, "A Region at Risk," which outlined strategies required to sustain the competitiveness, environmental quality and social equity of the New York City region through investments in transportation, communities, education, government reform and the environment.

He also co-authored "Dealing with Change in the Connecticut River Valley," which described innovative land-use, planning and visual-simulation techniques, and received awards from the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the American Planning Association.

Yaro has led or participated in urban and regional planning initiatives in the United Kingdom, Hungary, Japan, Canada and the Caribbean, as well as the U.S.

Yaro serves as design critic at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and as adjunct professor of urban planning at Columbia University. He is on the board of directors of the Institute for Urban Design and the National Growth Management Institute.

He holds a bachelor's degree in urban studies from Wesleyan University and a master's degree in city and regional planning from Harvard.

The Clarkson Chair was endowed in 1989 by William Clarkson, adjunct professor in the school of architecture, and his wife, Elisabeth, to provide for a senior visiting professor or scholar-in-residence in the School of Architecture and Planning. It is awarded in recognition of excellence in the recipient's pursuit of scholarship and professional application in architecture.