By JOE JAROSZ
Northeast News
March 19, 2014

KANSAS CITY, Missouri – A research project on revitalizing Independence Avenue, has earned an award for the students responsible.

Students with the Kansas City Design Center were recently notified that their research project “Independence Avenue Urban Vision Study” has received an Honor Award in the Communication category for the publication. The research project was developed in collaboration with the Mid America Regional Council as part of a HUD grant for sustainable places planning study and the KCMO Planning Department, which provided the remaining project funding via the city manager’s office.

Accord to KCDC executive assistant Tiffany Cartwright, the purpose of the publication was to generate an urban vision study for the four-mile stretch of Independence Avenue in northeast Kansas City. The study included its urban context and rendering a design proposition for strategic transformation and urban improvement. The most challenging question the publication had to come to terms with was the issue of a, “disjointed city.”

The students’ plans included turning the blighted area into a productive agricultural territory. The Avenue is marked by vacant and underutilized urban space short of buildings.

“An urban scape made up of the patches of imposing historic structures, vacant and disused lots and structures, ad hoc and colloquial street from architecture, the forgotten geography of the city beautiful imprint, and the reverberation of life of many cultures that stake its place in it,” the release says.

The publication focused its examination on confronting the reality of the four-mile stretch in northeast Kansas City. It also devised strategies to convert the problematic conditions into positives to help discover new possibilities for urban transformation.

The second realization of the study discovered that transformation could not be carried out only through architectural repurposing.

“This included rethinking the urban space as an infrastructural reserve, a productive agricultural territory and a hybrid of a public domain where utility and communal life cyclically exchange,” Cartwright said in the release.

The concept and design of the revitalization, which was its own challenge, could not have been done without the participation of the northeast community, “whose determination involvement and commitment to making a difference in improving their urban environment was a great guiding force,” Cartwright said.

Students involved in the study include: Blake Archer, Amanda Barker, Nick Baumgarten, Theron Bronson, Thomas Chambers, Celeste Clayton, Nick Fratta, Chris Gillam, Kayla Hales, Kurt Heinen, Danny Kliewer, Chloe Lewis, Vanessa Liu, Carissa Loehr, Ryan McCabe, Keith Moore Jr, Jeremy Nelson, JJ Nicolas, Eric Wencel, and Drew Yarnell.

Representatives of KCDC and the students will attend the Central States Awards luncheon in Omaha, Ne., on April 11, 2014, to receive the award.