The Kansas City metropolitan area is an important center for services and trade in the Great Plains. It is also one of the most suburban, with more highway miles per capita than any other region and few physiographic constraints to growth. One dilemma for the region is how to leverage its historic core to create nodes of urban vitality that could provide additional choice in the region and serve as a counterweight to continued expansion on the ex-urban fringe. Strategies that increase population in the region’s core are critical.
At the dawn of the twentieth century civic planners and architects in the City Beautiful movement used open space networks and classical-style buildings to humanize teeming industrial cities and to develop a sense of civic identity within their residents. The Kessler park system in Kansas City is a prime example of the City Beautiful.
The City Ecologies studio will focus on strategies that use civic open space in downtown Kansas City as catalysts in the creation of a vital and livable downtown. It will honor the legacy of the City Beautiful movement by reimagining civic design to address challenges of the new millennium, moving beyond naive notions of the urban picturesque to propose interventions that address the city’s condition as a complex ecology composed of natural, infrastructural and institutional systems interacting at multiple scales in an ongoing process of change. This will require drawing on a variety of civic spaces - including remnants of the city’s Kessler framework as well potentialities that have yet to come into being - and examining strategies that have multiple payoffs and/or initiate a larger set of changes.
This work expands on the Greater Downtown Area Plan’s goal of improving parks and open space through its vision to create “innovative public spaces [that] attract entrepreneurial businesses” and “a variety of public parks that are programmed to serve their area.” We envision downtown civic spaces – parks, plazas, and squares – acting as catalysts for improving quality of life for downtown residents and attracting new populations to the urban core.
This work expands on the Greater Downtown Area Plan’s goal of improving parks and open space through its vision to create “innovative public spaces [that] attract entrepreneurial businesses” and “a variety of public parks that are programmed to serve their area.” We envision downtown civic spaces – parks, plazas, and squares – acting as catalysts for improving quality of life for downtown residents and attracting new populations to the urban core.
