Making a Great City

A Signature Events Series Exploring (and Encouraging) Healthy Development in Kansas City

The Library’s popular Making a Great City speaking series, launched in January 2018, is designed to foster the healthy growth of Kansas City and examine the ways that development decisions can strengthen fiscal stability and reduce disparities in wealth across the community.

Programs in series have featured presentations by prominent urban planners and follow-up roundtable discussions among civic leaders. The focus shifted in March and April 2019 to Kansas City’s distinctive system of parks and boulevards, looking at its origins and the challenges of maintaining it.

More recently, former New York City planner M. Nolan Gray assessed the advantages of doing away with city zoning – the use of arbitrary lines that have come to dictate where Americans may live and work.

Participants also have included the mayors of Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas; the executive director of the Mid-America Regional Council; Doug McGowen, the forward-thinking chief operating officer of Memphis, Tennessee; and an array of urban planning specialists including New York urban revitalization strategist and entrepreneur Majora Carter and North Carolina-based Realtor and developer Tiffany Elder.

Esteemed urban planner Joe Minicozzi, also of North Carolina, spoke in 2018 and was subsequently commissioned to draft fiscal assessments of KCMO and KCK. He unveiled his analysis in another Making a Great City presentation that drew 303 people to the Library’s Plaza Branch in October 2019.

Nearly 3,800 people had attended a total of 16 Making a Great City events – in person or via livestream – through the end of 2023. Video and/or audio recordings of all programs are archived and accessible on the Library’s website and (in the case of video) its YouTube channel.

The series has been co-presented from the start by the Kansas City architecture and planning firm Multistudio. Also co-presenting one or more programs: the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, Greater Kansas City's LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation), Hall Family Foundation, Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors, Mid-America Regional Council, National Association of Realtors, Newmark Grubb Zimmer, Penn Valley Park Conservancy, Roanoke Park Conservancy, Urban Land Institute of Kansas City, Verimore Bank (formerly First Missouri Bank).

Here’s the full Making a Great City lineup:

Signature Event

Taking a ‘Collective’ Approach to Equitable Development in KC

Wednesday, September 7, 2022 6:00pm
Plaza Branch
Online
In Person
Tiffany Elder, co-chair of a Durham, North Carolina-based consortium called The Collective, talks about its work to facilitate equitable city building there. Two likeminded Kansas City-area business leaders, Shawnna Murrell and Terrell “TJ” Jolly, join her in a panel discussion.
Signature Event
people congregating in a neighborhood

You Don’t Have to Move Out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One

Thursday, August 11, 2022 6:00pm
Plaza Branch
Online
In Person
In a discussion of her book Reclaiming Your Community: You Don’t Have to Move out of Your Neighborhood to Live in a Better One, New York urban revitalization strategist and entrepreneur Majora Carter urges struggling, low-status communities to keep homegrown talent from moving away. Like the corporate world, she says,...
Signature Event
KC Spirit Playbook

Making a Great City: The KC Spirit Playbook

Wednesday, November 18, 2020 6:30pm
Online
What is Kansas City’s master plan for the next 20 years? The city’s three principal planning officers, Jeffrey Williams, Diane Binckley, and Kyle Elliott, join Cookingham-Noll City Management Fellow Jessica Oliphant in discussing the nearly two-year effort to draw up a new comprehensive development plan by 2022.
Signature Event
We've Built Cities We Can't Afford

We’ve Built Cities We Can’t Afford

Tuesday, March 3, 2020 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Kansas City has an infrastructure problem. Simply put, it can’t afford what it needs. Dennis Strait of the Kansas City studio of Gould Evans, an architecture and planning firm, lays out the problem and offers solutions: more strategic development and a restructured tax system.
Signature Event
Smart Growth in KC: How? Where?

Smart Growth in KC: How? Where?

Tuesday, October 29, 2019 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Which areas offer Kansas City the greatest potential for smart long-term growth? Urban planner Joe Minicozzi and Chuck Marohn, founder of the nonprofit Strong Towns, lend some direction.
Signature Event
Are You Ready for the Next Kansas City

Are You Ready for the Next Kansas City?

Tuesday, September 24, 2019 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Kansas City-based urban planner, designer, and architect Kevin Klinkenberg examines why and how cities being reinvented today, who the winners and losers have been, and how municipalities can make the most of this evolution – looking closely at Kansas City and other noncoastal metropolitan areas.
Signature Event
Sustaining KC's Parks and Boulevards

Sustaining KC's Parks and Boulevards

Tuesday, May 28, 2019 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Susan Rademacher, a leader in the nationwide parks conservancy movement for three decades, examines the challenge of keeping Kansas City’s signature system of parks and boulevards relevant and sustainable.
Signature Event
KC's Parks and Boulevards: The Next 125 Years

KC's Parks and Boulevards: The Next 125 Years

Tuesday, April 30, 2019 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Leon Younger, one of the nation’s most accomplished parks and recreation consultants, continues a three-part study of Kansas City’s distinctive system of parks and boulevards, which arose from a plan drawn up in 1893 by famed landscape architect George Kessler. Younger looks at how the system has evolved beyond Kessler...
Signature Event
Chuck Marohn Making a Great City

Neighborhoods First

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 6:30pm
Plaza Branch
In Person
Nationally renowned urban thinker Chuck Marohn, who kicked off the Library’s Making a Great City series in January 2018, returns to assess the crucial takeaways from all three sessions, including the advisability of an incremental, neighborhoods-first approach to development in cities such as Kansas City.