Tag Archives: Urban Planning

Civic Pride

Civic Pride – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In a week of great triumph for my city and impactful announcements, some words on civic pride. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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In a week of great triumph for my city and impactful announcements, some words on civic pride.

A city is as vibrant as the people who make it, and those who build on its strong foundations do well to recognize their forebearers. Cities are at the core of our concept of civilization, the city is the star about which a system of suburbs, exurbs, and ever more distant rural communities revolve. This has been true since antiquity, when the first human settlements were established for the mutual benefit of those who lived within them. Our cities today exist for similar reasons. It’s easier to live close to the places you work, eat, and play. It’s safer to live surrounded by like-minded people who in the best of circumstances will come together when a crisis emerges.

Cities are extensions of humanity; they can be organic in how they grow and function. The cancer and rot we’ve seen grow in our bodies that pose the greatest medical struggles today, mirrors the decay we’ve see in our cities in the last 70 years with urban renewal projects that removed vibrant urban life for new modes of living which prioritized distant suburbs and cars traveling far faster than one can walk in order to better connect our sprawl.

Our cities can find common passions in their livelihoods, civic pride in the things a city is known for making, and within the last 170 years in our professional sports. A central part of my love for my original hometown of Chicago comes from my memories as young boy in the suburbs of that city during the Bulls’ historic second threepeat and the Cubs wonderous 1998 season. Here in Kansas City the passion for our local teams, the Chiefs, Royals, Sporting, and the Current, is one common bond that runs throughout this city and its metropolitan region. We may agree on little else, but Kansas Citians agree on their passion for their teams.

This week then, Kansas City finds itself amid two pivotal moments in its recent history. On Sunday night the Kansas City Chiefs won their third Super Bowl in the last five years. This was also their second consecutive championship. As Quarterback Patrick Mahomes said in his post-game press conference, “the Kansas City Chiefs are never underdogs.” This success for the city’s football team remains in stark contrast to the Chiefs of my childhood. They made a playoff run during my first year living here, yet I remember listening to their early knockout defeat on the radio around New Year’s 2000. On the day that this is released, the Chiefs will parade down Grand Boulevard through Downtown & the Crossroads surrounded by what will surely be crowds of 1 million or more.

On Tuesday of this week, perhaps hoping to ride on the celebratory mood, the Kansas City Royals, this city’s Major League Baseball team, announced nearly 5 months late their choice for a new stadium site to replace the 52 year old Kauffman Stadium located next to the Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium in the eastern suburbs. In September of last year, the Royals had announced two preferred stadium sites, one on the east side of downtown along the east loop where Interstate 70 and US-71 round the urban core, and the other in North Kansas City across the Missouri River from Downtown in suburban Clay County.

By the time the official announcement was released the rumors of what the announcement would hold had already been circulating for a good 12 hours, and to the bafflement of many, the delight of some, and the dismay of more the team announced they’d chosen a third site now occupied by the Kansas City Star Pavilion and a host of small businesses bounded by Truman Road on the north, Locust Street on the east, 17th Street on the south, and Grand Boulevard on the west. This site would be conveniently located next to the local indoor arena, the T-Mobile Center, where Kansas City’s hypothetical professional basketball and hockey teams would play. The proposed stadium would also connect to a park that is in the planning to be built over Interstate 670 on the south loop, which would continue to run beneath the park and new stadium.

A city needs to balance the causes of all of its constituents, each organ working in its own manner with minimal conflict between them. The proposed site of this stadium brings out clear and obvious conflict with local small businesses, Crossroads neighborhood residents, and the transportation grid of this city. I support the south loop park project which would cover Interstate 670 and better connect the Crossroads with Downtown, yet by that proposal Walnut Street and Grand Boulevard would be blocked by the park, which was fine before a baseball stadium was proposed to go there. The stadium proposal blocks Oak Street, a vital, if less used artery which runs along the east side of Downtown and the Crossroads connecting to Gillham Road in Midtown and eventually Rockhill Road at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Holmes Road on the east side of Brookside, my neighborhood.

The proposed stadium also displaces many vibrant local businesses that are located within its proposed footprint and will likely displace further local businesses in the surrounding blocks with a large new stadium dropped in the middle of their neighborhood. To me, it seems as though the team went out of its way to choose a third option which would disrupt as much of this city’s urban life as possible. With that in mind, I’m inclined to vote no on the question of whether we, Jackson County residents should renew the 3/8th-cent sales tax that’s on our April ballot in order to keep the Royals from building a stadium at this site.

Yet, I’m not opposed to a downtown stadium. I’m merely opposed to this proposed final location for the downtown stadium. I would prefer the City of Kansas City include questions on the April ballot asking municipal residents whether we’d prefer this location or the location on the east side of Downtown, which was the team’s original preference in Kansas City, Missouri. That location is currently occupied by parking lots rather than local businesses. It won’t require the demolition of a few vibrant blocks of urban life like the Crossroads location would. The one downside to the eastern location is that it is further away from the Streetcar line, the Power and Light District, and the T-Mobile Center. Yet spectators attending games at the current stadium walk further as it is often than they would in that situation.

At the end of it all, considering the history of teams that do not get their way with public funding for new stadiums, I worry that the current ballot question will not serve local residents in the best way possible. We stand to lose a great deal if the 3/8th-cent ballot question doesn’t pass, as both the Royals and the Chiefs have signaled their intent to look beyond Jackson County for new homes without that funding. While I expect the Chiefs to stay in Kansas City, I have my doubts about the Royals. 

While all this is going on here, back in Chicago the White Sox and Bears organizations are also pressuring the City of Chicago and suburban municipalities for options for new stadiums as well. The Bears were all set on a northwestern suburban location in Arlington Heights until new pressures there have led them within the last week to muse about demolishing historic Soldier Field in favor of a new stadium in the old one’s southern parking lot along Burnham Harbor. Meanwhile, last week the White Sox released designs for a new stadium located 1 mile west of Soldier Field at an empty lot between Clark Street to the east, the South Branch of the Chicago River to the west, Roosevelt Road to the north, and 16th Street to the south. Over the summer when the White Sox initially found lukewarm reception for their own stadium rebuild, their leadership mused about either leaving Chicago for the suburbs or even going to Nashville.

My worry about the Royals, then, is that if they don’t get their way with the City of Kansas City, they’ll either move to North Kansas City, which would be all right but not ideal in my book, or worse out of town all together to a booming market like Nashville, Portland, or Austin. This city is proud of its teams, proud of its people, and proud of its local character. Let’s have clearer communication between all the parties involved in as momentous a decision as this new Royals Stadium as we can.I want to see a downtown stadium, just not on the site being proposed. One piece of the report from KCURthat bugged me more than others was that the Royals were unconcerned about the parking situation around their proposed stadium in the Crossroads because “as existing parking downtown can accommodate fans who drive to games.” This says to me they see all the expansive parking lots that remain in the Crossroads as permanent features of the area, and not temporary eyesores from a time when we thought it good to carve out our urban cores for the sake of suburban development. It says to me that the Royals organization wants to operate in the urban core but not be a part of the community.

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Following Up

I write these blog posts on Mondays and Tuesdays, and after writing this one yesterday afternoon I’ve since read more about the project. To put it simply: I don’t know what I think about this project. One glaring issue I still have is that Royals organization has a website for their new stadium but I couldn’t find it on Google. Rather, I found it linked in a Reddit post. All of the information I have comes from KCUR, KSHB, KCTV-5, and the Kansas City Star, as well as other individuals on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter). One Reddit user posted a side-by-side comparison of the proposed stadium and the current site.

Courtesy of u/acparks1 on Reddit

I’m still disappointed that the Royals are choosing a site that is presently occupied, and that in their FAQ they rely on current surface parking lots that dot the Crossroads for future game-day parking when we should be looking at redeveloping those lots and building garages to handle downtown parking.

Yet, I drove through this area yesterday evening on the way to a Fat Tuesday party, and I can see how they could make this site work. I still have many reservations about this project, but this morning, I don’t oppose it. I’m not issuing a retraction for several reasons: my original argument still stands on some of these issues, the podcast was already published at midnight, and I don’t have a backup plan. If anything, I want to make it clear how there are benefits and detriments to this plan. I wish the Royals site would acknowledge the impact their plan will have by closing Oak Street and displacing the businesses on the 1600 and 1700 blocks of Walnut, McGee, and Oak Streets, and again I wish they would discuss building more compact parking options than the swaths of surface parking that remains a blemish on our urban core.

I’m not happy about this blog post because I want to offer you a clear argument. Yet in this instance I’m not sure I can, there are too many factors involved. If we were looking at a spectrum with 0 as complete opposition and 100 as complete support, when I wrote the original blog post on Tuesday afternoon I was at a 35 or 40, still opposed to this project but not vehemently so. Now, I’m closer to a 55 or 60, supportive of it yet still quite cautious about what it could hold for our city.

Designing Cities for People

St Paul's at Sunset - April 2016

St Paul’s at Sunset

In older standards of measurement, the imperial mile (1.609 km) was not the longest measurement of distance available; the league filled that role instead. As I have understood it, one league is equal to the distance a person can walk in one hour. For me, that is around three miles, thus making 1 league equal to a decent distance for a nice morning stroll. In 2016 when I was undertaking my first Master’s degree, this one in International Relations and Democratic Politics, at the University of Westminster, I would occasionally decide to walk the league from the university on Regent Street back to my flat in the shadow of Fenchurch Street station on the eastern edge of the old Roman city.

The walk was quite pleasant, a stroll first down from the university to Oxford Circus, then eastwards along Oxford Street to Holborn, and then down High Holborn across the Holborn Viaduct and past the Old Bailey at Newgate, past St Paul’s and onto Cheapside, crossing in front of the Royal Exchange and Bank of England before continuing down Lombard Street and onto Fenchurch Street. At Fenchurch Street station, I would descend a short flight of steps leading towards St Olave’s Hart Street and under the station viaduct itself past the city walls and into my building on Minories.

What made this a nice walk was that I was able to see so much of the capital, everything from the imperial Edwardian grandeur of Regent Street to the new skyscrapers that are being built across the Square Mile to the east. It was an opportunity to experience London as so many had done so before, to get to know the metropolis by foot. In London this is something that can fairly easily be done, one can walk around the capital if one wants to. Sure, most of the suburbs are out of reach for the pedestrian, but with the well established system of underground and suburban railways, as well with the very thorough bus network, London is a city that a person can easily live in without owning a car, let alone riding in one on a daily basis.

When I moved back to Kansas City at the end of August 2016, I thought I would try at keeping up my walking, to walk the same ten miles each day. Yet that didn’t happen. Far from it, I found Kansas City to a.) be built largely for cars, and b.) with a climate far more harsh than the one I had known in London. As a result, not only did I not walk nearly as much as I had wanted, but I found myself hardly walking at all beyond going out of my parents’ house to get into the car and drive somewhere.

While my own lack of fortitude certainly is to blame in part for this sudden drop in my exercise, I also have to lay blame on the city planners here in Kansas City. This city, like so many others in the United States and Canada were designed, or re-designed, for motorists. In fact, it is illegal for a human being to walk in the street in Kansas City, Missouri; if you’re human, you have to stay to the sidewalks (pavements). The rest of the street is reserved for cars, buses, bicycles, vans, and trucks. We have built this city and so many others like it without the human touch that has made cities so universally human in nature.

For thousands of years, our ancestors have lived in cities that were not unlike the Central London; they were just big enough that an able-bodied person could walk from one end to another in about an hour. Cities were built with walking in mind, with the understanding that all of the basic necessities that a city offers should be within walking distance of each citizen’s home. Smaller medieval cities like Besançon in France, Canterbury in England, or Galway in Ireland are prime examples of this sort of pedestrian-focused urban planning.

“In fact, it is illegal for a human being to walk in the street in Kansas City, Missouri”

Here in the United States too there are some attempts at returning to this older model of having residential and commercial establishments within the same general area. Here in Greater Kansas City there are some newer developments that aspire to this goal. Two in particular that I visited this last Friday stand out to me as examples of how to undertake this task, and how not to do so. The latest pieces in the Town Center shopping complex, Park Place is an excellent example of such a development.

A set of winding, narrower streets lined by three and four story buildings, its street level fronts are filled with shops, restaurants, and some offices, while the upper levels are largely residential. In this way, one can live in a compact community, within which one does not necessarily need a car to get around. I first was able to experience Park Place two years ago when walking a 5K through the Town Center area. At that time Park Place was still under construction, yet even as a construction site it seemed vastly out of place when compared to its neighbours in the most arch-suburban of American counties, Johnson County, Kansas. What particularly makes Park Place odd, and in the end stunted in its growth and feasibility is that one has to have a car to access it. Sure, one could live within Park Place as a pedestrian, but going beyond its towering confines on foot can be a perilous exercise with traffic on the surrounding avenues averaging a speed of around 45 mph (72 km/h).

What Park Place does well is its compactness, including both commercial and residential in the same area. Another, equally new development a few miles south of Park Place ignores this principle of traditional urban planning, setting the residential aside from the commercial. This particular development is the fascinatingly misplaced Prairiefire complex on 135th Street in Leawood, Kansas. Another physically enormous complex, Prairiefire’s crown jewel is the Museum at Prairiefire, billed as Kansas City’s Natural History Museum, and an affiliate with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. While the Prairiefire Museum’s architecture is aesthetically beautiful, its size is much like the rest of the Prairiefire development: lacking long-term thinking.

My biggest problem with Prairiefire is the way in which its residential development is divided from its commercial sector by a massive concrete parking garage. Prairiefire was designed by a suburbanite intending to create their image of a compact urban community, albeit without ever having stepped foot inside of a traditional compact city. By splitting the residential from the commercial, they make it far less amenable to residents to take advantage of the shops, restaurants, and entertainment in the commercial side of the property. What’s more, the Museum at Prairiefire itself is deeply flawed in that it is not built with the ability to expand in mind. The current structure is small, built more like a community arts centre and less like a great temple dedicated to nature.

Our over-reliance on cars here in the United States is flawed at the utmost degree. Should there be a major energy crisis in the near future, the vast majority of our cities and states will find themselves paralysed, unable to function owing to the lack of oil to fuel our cars. Developments like Park Place and Prariefire might be able to last for longer, owing to their relative compactness compared to the more traditional suburban sprawl, yet their isolation amidst the sea of suburbia will soon find these two developments in the same situation as the traditional suburban developments.

Our cities must first and foremost be self-reliant; we must be able to grow our own food, and use our own renewable energy sources to power all aspects of our lives. Yet along side this if we are going to build smart, self-sufficient cities, we must build them more compactly, with ourselves in mind. Just consider, if you are suddenly without your car, and don’t have the option of taking public transport, how will you get around? You could certainly walk around your city, but that prospect is only truly viable if said city is designed for walking.

Today, I generally prefer using metric to the more traditional imperial standards of measurement, yet that most old-fashioned of imperial measures, the league, is one that should be maintained. It keeps us humans at the centre, and reminds us of our own physical limitations and abilities. When we consistently push ourselves far beyond those abilities, we endanger the stability of our societies, making any potential crisis even more disastrous.