The Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio was created in 1983 under the sponsorship of the Urban University Program, which supports the outreach and community service efforts of Ohio's state universities working in urban areas. Under its founding director, Foster Armstrong, the Center expanded on the existing outreach and public service activities of Kent State's Architecture School, focusing particularly on historic preservation and the problems of Northeast Ohio's smaller towns and cities. At the same time, working with studio courses at Kent State, the UDC administered research into larger urban issues in Cleveland and other urban cores. Foster Armstrong retired in 1993, but remained active in Kent State’s teaching and public service work until his death in 2000.

The UDC's third director, Ruth Durack, arrived in 1998, and the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative opened in late 1999. This new facility allowed Kent State to realize a long-standing goal of placing academic and outreach programs in urban design in Cleveland, which since 1972 had lacked a resident architecture school. The CUDC has allowed Kent State graduate students to pursue their studies in closer contact with real-world urban design challenges. At the same time, it has allowed the professional staff to have a much more sustained impact on efforts to re-develop the neighborhoods of the region’s largest city. While Kent State’s outreach activities in Cleveland have greatly increased thanks to the new location, an expanded professional staff has been able to continue working in other Northeast Ohio cities, suburbs and villages, among them Akron, Youngstown, Ashtabula, North Royalton, Perry and Hubbard.

In 2003, the CUDC began an ongoing collaboration with the Dresden University of Technology, Kent State’s sister university in Germany, with a joint course on the revitalization of the lower Cuyahoga Valley in Cleveland. Since then, there have been a number of faculty exchanges, as the two universities seek to pool their expertise, both to enhance students’ experiences and to better serve their respective regions.

Ruth Durack returned to her native Perth late in 2004 to take up the directorship of the newly founded Urban Design Centre of Western Australia. During the search for her successor the CUDC engaged in a strategic visioning process that identified a number of goals for its research and advocacy missions. In particular. With the appointment of Christopher Diehl as Director in Spring 2007, the CUDC hopes to develop innovative ways to further integrate the service and academic components of the CUDC with more opportunities for student interaction with the Urban Design Center’s community partners. The CUDC has also embarking on a multi-year effort to develop and test design techniques appropriate to urban centers that have lost population (“Shrinking Cities”), joining in an ongoing national and international dialogue about quality of life in regions that anticipate little or no growth in coming decades.