Since the Fall semester, we have gained 8 new students in our studio! We have been hard at work designing the final master plan for the Bethany Park site and are working on the individual housing units and typologies that will be used on the site. Our goal is to create walkable, affordable, and safe housing that fits in with the surrounding neighborhood, building upon the rich culture and fostering a sense of community with our masterplan, while also adding new amenities to the park space. 

We had the opportunity to present our schematic designs to a guest panel including architects from BNIM and DRAW Architects. Additionally, we had the opportunity to present to leadership and staff of the UG's Planning and Urban Design Department of Wyandotte County at the Neighborhood Resource Center in KCK. We discussed organization strategies for our new housing around the site, what amenities we would add to Bethany Park (additions to Bethany Park are shown in the masterplan legend), and connections our site has to KCK as a whole. Their input was immensely valuable and has made our studio’s updated masterplan better than it was before. 

We are excited about the great benefits this masterplan can provide for KCK. Stay tuned for future updates on its progression! 

We're thrilled to have the physical copies of the West Bottoms in Three Parts in hand! Two KCDC students, Jacob Bandy and Haley Combs, worked on the publication to ensure that it encapsulated the in-depth research, analysis, and design development that occurred during the 2022-23 academic year. We will be dispersing the publication to our project partners and have added a link to view the book digitally on our website. We are so proud of the students for putting so much thought into the project and are immensely grateful to our community partners for supporting us and providing critical feedback throughout the year. We hope you enjoy learning about the West Bottoms and the surrounding area and the possibilities for its transformation as you look through the book (and maybe buy a copy for your collection!)

Greetings from KCDC Studio! In the fall of 2023, the KCDC studio began working with the unified government of Wyandotte/KCK Planning’s Urban Design Department on a year-long project to study the Central Avenue Corridor in Kansas City, Kansas. The studio focused on designing a masterplan for a new mixed-use development in Bethany Park, where a demolished hospital complex left a large, open space in the Riverview Neighborhood. The fall studio studied the rich history, cultural context, and current conditions around the park and neighborhoods to pose a thesis on the future of housing on the site, touching on issues of density, amenities, connection to existing neighborhoods, and the role of development in the overall health and economic vitality of the neighborhood.