Yaro to Lead Second UB Session On Regionalism

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Robert D. Yaro, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, America's oldest and most distinguished independent metropolitan research and advocacy group, will offer perspectives on land use and planning at the second session of "Regionalism: From Agenda to Action," a series of discussions on regional collaboration coordinated by the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth at the University at Buffalo.

The session will be held from 5-8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 24, in the Buffalo Hilton.

The focus of the session -- improved approaches to land use and planning, with emphasis on Erie and Niagara counties -- emerged from the series' first session, in which participants had identified land use and planning as a top priority for the region. A similar emphasis came out of last June's Chautauqua Conference on Regional Governance.

Following a dialogue with Yaro on these issues, participants at the session will generate action steps in land use and planning for the Western New York region.

The 1998 Clarkson Visiting Chair in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, Yaro also is a design critic in the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and an adjunct professor of urban planning at Columbia University.

Executive director since 1990 of the Regional Plan Association, which serves the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan region, Yaro co-authored the group's third regional plan, "A Region at Risk" (1996), as well as "Dealing With Change in the Connecticut River Valley" (1989), which won several national awards.

He 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.

Founded last summer, the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth assists area governments and other service providers in promoting regional opportunity throughout Western New York.

For more information about the conference, call the institute at 716-829-3777. The deadline for reservations is Feb. 13.