Close Up
Making UB’s campuses better places
Writing about planning activities while a reporter sparked Bradshaw Hovey’s interest in the urban planning field. Photo: NANCY J. PARISI
Bradshaw Hovey, associate director of UB’s Urban Design Project, didn’t start out to become an urban planner.
In fact, he didn’t start off in the field at all. As an aspiring journalist, he got his start by convincing the UB student newspaper, The Spectrum, to let him be a reporter although he was an Empire State College student. After graduating, Hovey wrote for the Buffalo Courier-Express before it folded in 1982 and then wrote for newspapers in Albuquerque and New Jersey before returning to Buffalo to report for Business First.
It was during his time at Business First when he covered downtown development, real estate and urban development that he met Robert Shibley, UB architecture professor and now senior advisor to the president for campus planning and design. Writing about Shibley’s various Buffalo-area projects, Hovey found the urban planning process fascinating. “I realized the things I wrote about were the things they were actually doing. And I imagined I would have more influence as a planner than a reporter,” he says.
So Hovey left reporting to enroll in UB’s master’s program in urban planning. After graduation, Shibley hired him to work at The Caucus Partnership—the private consultancy he ran with his partner, architecture faculty member Lynda Schneekloth—and as time went on, Hovey became involved with the Urban Design Project. One of his first projects was helping design and manage the award-winning Buffalo Neighborhood Summits—massive community workshops in each council district spearheaded by former Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello.
Raised in Buffalo, Hovey admits that leaving the city and returning has become a dynamic in his life. He left Buffalo to pursue his Ph.D. in urban design and planning at the University of Washington, and returned to work on the Urban Design Project. More recently, he took a faculty position at Texas Southern University in Houston but returned to Western New York when asked to work on Building UB, the comprehensive physical plan for the university’s three campuses.
He also serves as staff to the Environmental Stewardship Committee, which is charged with creating a plan to help UB achieve “climate neutrality”—a task that overlaps a lot with the comprehensive plan.
Hovey thinks that working on the comprehensive plan was an extraordinary opportunity and reason to return to Buffalo. “This is my home. This is the place I care about,” he says. “There is nothing I could be doing right now more important to Buffalo’s future than helping make UB’s campuses better places—places we can truly love.”
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