Guiding Principles
The Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence emphasizes on the quality of design and placemaking through the following guiding principles.
A Confluence of Strategies
Explore urban excellence as quality design through vision and leadership, collaborative partnerships among various disciplines and professions, engaging and empowering people affected by the place, anchoring in place, and leveraging design.
Curation
Curate the RBA Collection through maintenance, new programming, material additions, and the optimization of accessibility to the collections at the UB Libraries.
Multiple Perspectives
Use the Center and its programs to sustain a diverse conversation on the nature of urban excellence. The goal is not to conclude the discussion, but instead ensure it continues with an ethic of inclusion across multiple perspectives, professions, and disciplines.
Excellent projects are born from the aspiration to achieve something of significance combined with sufficient ambition and commitment to see them through, generally over extended periods of time while encountering and overcoming many obstacles. Leadership must provide not only bold vision but also follow-through and perseverance to see projects into
implementation.
- Farbstein et al. 2017. Investing in Urban Infrastructure.
Sustained Engagement
Sustain the community of RBA engagers, including the past selection committee members, award winners, and organizational partners through the Web, social media, video, publishing programs, convening conversations, and educational and research programs and partnerships.
Design
Design is a fundamental organizing principle of the Center’s conversations that explore urban environments responsive to the needs, constituencies, and cultures of places.
Storytelling
Employ the power of visual and narrative storytelling to offer persuasive examples of design excellence and lessons learned.
Safe Spaces
Seek to convene in safe spaces to discuss innovative solutions to design and data-informed urban conditions.