The APA is a nonprofit, public-interest and education organization representing 28,000 professional planners, elected and appointed officials and citizens concerned with urban and rural development issues. The Upstate New York Chapter represents approximately 600 planners, and elected and appointed public officials throughout New York State and Southern Ontario.

The awards will be presented during the APA Upstate Chapter's annual conference to be held in Buffalo Sept. 28 and 29. The awards luncheon will take place on Friday, Sept. 29, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

One winning UB project, "Niagara Park, North America," was developed by 11 first-year graduate students in planning under the direction of Ernest Sternberg, UB associate professor of planning. It proposed that attractions on both sides of Niagara Falls be turned into a bi-national pedestrian park. Students worked with an advisory group of business and government leaders from both sides of the border, convened and funded by the Canadian Consulate in Buffalo.

Among the recommendations made by the students is elimination of auto traffic and landscaping of the area to make it a more interesting tourist experience. Other recommendations include the eventual closing of the Rainbow Bridge to automobile traffic, creating, instead, a pedestrian link between the two sides of the park.

The second winning UB project is "The Lower West Side: Strategies for Neighborhood and Community Revitalization," developed by the UB students in the Urban Design Project under the direction of UB planning professor Robert Shibley.

The Urban Design Project, sited in the UB School of Architecture and Planning, has, for the last five years, worked with Lower West Side residents and businesses to identify and implement community-based planning strategies for neighborhood improvement. The plan was cited by the APA for impact it is already having on Buffalo's revitalization efforts in this key neighborhood, bordered by the Peace Bridge, downtown and the Main-High medical complex.

"It is always critical," says Shibley, "to keep the community directly involved in determining its own future by helping to identify the emerging community consensus of what needs to be done here and how."

In addition to residents and businesses, the planners worked cooperatively with community centers, block clubs, politicians and representatives of development agencies and governmental bodies to identify physical development plans that Mayor Anthony Masiello has called "well within existing resources...doable now."

They also identified strategies for addressing crime, poverty and housing issues; removing obstacles to private investment in a manner consistent with community visions; increasing opportunity for home ownership and attractive, affordable rental housing, and minimizing the negative impacts of traffic, trash and unattended vacant lots.

Masiello has called the Lower West Side neighborhood a longtime "victim of somebody else's improvement project," many of which, he has said, have had deleterious effects on the quality of life in the community.

He has applauded the UB West Side project as one that will help insure that "future infrastructure investments, targeted code enforcement activities, home ownership programs and incentives for commercial development are put in place in a way that make the Lower West Side a beautiful, healthy and safe place to live."