The Landing is situated in a very unique place and is thus put in a very interesting opportunistic position.
Kansas City holds a very interesting title that is unknown to the majority of the public-even most planners. The City is home of the biggest and most complete Parks and Boulevard system in the WORLD. This is even more interesting learning that the brains behind this project, George Kessler, lived to see its completion. This is a feet that is unheard of, especially in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
William Wilson in “The City Beautiful Movement in Kansas City”
“The City Beautiful movement was fundamentally important to Kansas City. It remade an ugly boomtown, giving it miles of graceful boulevards and parkways flanked by desirable residential sections, acres of ruggedly beautiful parkland dotted with recreational improvements, and several neighborhood playgrounds in crowded districts. Its results received attention and praise from city planners across the United States. It gave scope to the ambition and talent of George E. Kessler, whose success in Kansas City was the gateway to nationwide recognition in the professions of landscape architecture and city planning. Its boulevards helped define the natural demarcations among commercial, industrial, and residential sections, and were a boon to neighborhood stability in the years before effective zoning. It reached into every part of the city, establishing unity through its own pervasiveness. In later years another set of city planners would find the much maligned City Beautiful architects had willed them a boulevard grid to ease the mounting loads of automobile traffic, had pointed the way to greater use of the park and boulevard system’s recreational opportunities, and had left to them a precious legacy of urban beauty.”
The Landing is situated in a perfect position to connect the ending of the Paseo Boulevard and the Dunn Park. This is one of the driving parts of my design, as well as beefing up the landscaping along the Troost and 63rd corridors.
Parks have a variety of benefits and is essential the the health of the nearby residents, especially the added 100-200 residents that will be living in the new complex in the Landing. These include lower stress, lower depression and an increase in happiness. Along with this it emphasizes community and connects people. There are studies that show that the strongest indicators of life expectancy are relationships with family, friends and neighbors.
The only way to build density is to encourage it and by making this site a very attractive .