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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
How Urban Lab plans to reshape Kansas City
Urban Lab, a Kansas City-based urbanist group, hopes to inspire city leaders to reimagine streets, developments, and public spaces. Founded by architect Matt Hasek, this grassroots organization has grown organically by creating compelling visual representations that help people see how urban spaces could be different.
• Kansas City has more highway miles per capita than nearly anywhere else in the United States
• The city once had 350 miles of streetcar, now reduced to just 2.2 miles of streetcar
• Urban Lab creates detailed visualizations of specific Kansas City locations rather than generic urban spaces
• Their work includes reimagining the historic Plaza area, the Grand Boulevard corridor, and proposals for highway removal
• One of their designs is currently being implemented by the city, with 80-85% of their model likely to be realized
• Urban Lab's process focuses on both building on existing momentum and introducing new concepts to spark conversation
• Their visualizations target both the general public and city officials who can implement change
You can learn more about Urban Lab here.
This week on Transit Tangents, we speak with Urban Lab, a Kansas City-based group advocating for better urban spaces through impressive design work and visualizations of city streets, developments and a whole lot more. We'll also talk about plans to remove a highway development along the city's soon-to-be-extended streetcar line and find out what's in store for the future of Urban Lab. Hey everybody and welcome to this episode of Transit Tangents. My name is Lewis and I'm Chris, and today we are fortunate to have two special guests with us. We've been here in Kansas City for the last few days. We've gotten a chance to chat with both of these guys quite a bit. We were super excited to have a really fun happy hour event when we first got into town and these guys made sure that we actually had people to talk to when we got there. So first off, if you guys want to introduce yourselves as well as Urban Lab, which is the group that you started, and you all have created a small army of folks kind of working to do all sorts of great work here in Kansas City.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, I'm Matt Hasek. I'm the one that founded Urban Lab, and if you want to introduce yourself, anthony Hugo.
Speaker 2:I do communications and public outreach for Urban Lab.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Urban Lab really is just like a small grassroots group that we started a few years ago. That's really sort of like general urbanism within Kansas City, but primarily what we focus on is looking at solutions. So it's one thing to talk about all the problems that you find in like urbanism spaces, but what we really do is look at doing graphic visualizations of how we can fix those spaces. So anything from looking at historical analysis of Kansas City to doing like road equity projects.
Speaker 1:For folks not from Kansas City. Can you guys just give us a rough overview of, like what is the current state of kind of urbanism in Kansas City? Is there a lot of the old and, like you know, we've gotten to see some of this over the last few? Is there a lot of the old and, like you know, we've gotten to see some of this over the last few days? But is some of the old historic charm still existing in a lot of areas? Has a lot of it been torn down? Is there kind of a Yimby movement happening? What is the current state of things here in KC?
Speaker 3:I would say in terms of, like old charm, most of the charm is still here. A lot that um is focused on like the, the north south corridor between like river market to plaza and then even south of that, and then a little bit of that and still intact. Uh, east of downtown um, a lot of the the stuff that was ripped out is more so just directly east of the downtown itself, the east village with paseo west area. A lot of that was affected by urban renewal and so all of that has been sort of industrialized since its sort of inception in the early 1800s or the late 1800s, early 1900s. But outside of that most of the historic charm is still in Kansas City. I don't know if you have anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think speaking to urbanism as a whole and the YIMBY kind of movement across the nation and in Kansas City, it very much reflects the history of Kansas City and austerity. We kind of have an uphill battle here because we have more highway miles per capita than, I think, anywhere else in the United.
Speaker 1:States at this point.
Speaker 2:It's rough. We went from having 350 miles of streetcar and 700 miles of interurban rail to 2.2 miles of streetcar. So we're getting back to it. But it's just kind of shaping the conversation and the ideas around what Kansas City used to be and what it can be that we're really trying to push with our group and get back to kind of a traditional format.
Speaker 4:Cool. I'm glad you mentioned the streetcar. We have the new streetcar here, the KC streetcar that we think it started in 2016. We got a chance to ride it this week. We're going to get a chance to talk to the streetcar authority as well. Have you seen more interest in urbanism and in development in KC? Focusing on public transit, focusing on even preserving these spaces and turning them into new and useful places? Have you seen that interest grow with the introduction of the streetcar?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. It's been really catalyzing for people to kind of rally behind the idea of what transportation in Kansas City could be again, because my entire time growing up all I knew was driving downtown going to this one specific place and then at the end of the day you leave and you don't really explore anything. But with the streetcar that attitude's completely changed. I mean there's people who are growing up in their formative years who are experiencing Kansas City in completely different ways, and I think that's been huge to get people to take a little bit more pride in where they're at. There always was kind of this attitude of you know, it's just Kansas City, we're just in the Midwest. Nobody really had this concept of what the sense of place should be and I think the streetcar has done, you know, a huge heavy lifting aspect there with respect to how people view the city again and showing people like what it could be Exactly yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think the streetcar always has had a special place in kansas city's culture.
Speaker 3:Like you even look at like the final days of kansas city's streetcar running back in the 50s, like they, they filmed the entire route, that final route that it ran right, and so there were restaurants that were named after it, uh, and what it always been had been kind of a local legend.
Speaker 3:But to have that reintroduction of the streetcar, it kind of fit right back into the culture of Kansas City and almost kind of like in a new way too. It's interesting to kind of sit on the streetcar and listen to conversations of people because you do get unlike the bus system where it's typically like regular commuters that are riding it you do get everybody, a little bit of everybody that's riding it. You know both tourists and sort of local commuters as well, specifically within the short route that it runs currently. But like you listen to the conversations that take place on there and sometimes you'll hear people say like this is my first time ever riding public transit, or kids running around the vehicle while it's moving because it's the first time they've ever been in a vehicle where they don't have to wear seatbelts. It's a lot of people's first introduction to public transit and really opens them up to what public transit can be when they spend most of their lives here in Kansas city, where there's a little bit of a transit deficiency in the overall Metro.
Speaker 1:Right, uh, kind of getting back to urban labs. So you all do some really interesting things in regards to. You know, a lot of advocacy in cities is okay. We want to try to like shift directions on this and they'll kind of like find projects that are already in motion to support or, you know, kind of find ways to complain about something and, but not necessarily, offer up the full solution, and what you all do with all of the design principles are really interesting. So can you kind of walk me through your process of how are you kind of identifying projects and, uh, kind of like let folks who aren't familiar with urban lab know, like what, what your process is. You're going through and you're you're actually creating these full proposals.
Speaker 3:I think the process is really interesting, yeah, and I wouldn't necessarily say full proposals, more so, a lot of the times it's just getting an idea out there, right. So there are a couple of ways. Sometimes we gravitate towards ideas that are already in motion. So, for example, we did a project where the plaza, which is sort of a historic commercial area here in Kansas City, there was a lot of momentum to try to pedestrianize it, right, you look at polls on Twitter at the time and you ask, like, if there was one street that you could pedestrianize, what would it be? And it'd be JC Nichols Road right, which runs right through the plaza. There was a lot of momentum to that, and so we kind of jumped off the momentum that was already there and created a visualization to show what that looked like. And it was the first visualization that had been put out there, which is why it got so much momentum.
Speaker 3:But sometimes we just put ideas out there that you know we have floating in our head and then, because we put that visualization of how the space could be different, then people start talking about it after that, and so that's where a lot of the excitement can be, you know, being able to get public conversation started with that, in terms of like some of the posts that we put out, there's a couple audiences that we really go kind of gravitate towards. The first one is sort of general public, you know, people who aren't too much in the urbanism space and really, again, try to get ideas out there, try to get them talking about these things. But sometimes we are also targeting sort of the city officials, people who have like actual power in the city and say, like you know, trying to get them to uh actually get uh momentum going, so they're the ones that really can get these projects going and so sometimes we target specifically them so that we can get uh that momentum actually uh solidified and concrete.
Speaker 1:So yeah, no, I. I think it's like such a useful tool to be able to just point to something like again uh, for, for folks watching we'll include some visuals, but for folks just listening the plaza area Chris and I got to go check it out yesterday. You'll correct me on the history here if I get it wrong, but it was in the 1920s. It was initially built and it was generally considered to be the first suburban shopping center in the US really where folks would be in a lot of cases driving out to it. They have a lot of cases driving out to it. Um, they have a lot of kind of hidden parking garages throughout in a similar to like a Texas donut style. Uh, you know, hiding it, wrapping the parking garage with buildings around it and whatnot. Um, and yeah, it's really interesting that you know you're in Kansas city and all of a sudden it feels like you're in Spain.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Very much like we were joking, like somebody went to Seville and they came back and said oh, I missed this walkable town that I was in, why don't we introduce the car to it? And that's literally the story right?
Speaker 1:I mean, didn't some of the, the, the person who, like they, went to Seville and saw it right and it came back? Yeah, right, um, but it's, it's a. It's an interesting part of a shopping mall kind of vibe to it, but it can be. It has a potential. It already is, in some regards, a really nice urban space, but it has the potential to really take it to the next level with this proposal.
Speaker 4:yeah, um, yeah I think I think it's a really good use case. I love the fact that you're using visuals to sort of, um, get people thinking and inspire them. Um, because people are very you know, they're very visual. You want to see what the space is going to look like and really try to inspire. Have you had any other examples of spaces where you've made these visualizations and it really sort of took off or people you know started to talk about this?
Speaker 3:bring it up in conversation, well so actually, there's one project that I've got in mind maybe not so much one that we publicized so much, but this was more of an experimental one and it so far is actually being uh pretty successful where we we had, uh, there's a corridor that's already under, under uh sort of the magnifying glass by the city that they want to resurface the road and then restripe it so that they can add, you know, more uh crosswalks to it and and, uh, potentially like a mobility lane or a bike lane to it.
Speaker 3:Um, and so what we did was we modeled up the entire corridor in SketchUp and then basically just did what we thought should be the remarkings for the road markings on that corridor, and they hadn't even designed it at that point, yet we were way ahead of what their schedule was. We presented the model to them, we presented the model to some community members. Community members some of the business owners loved it because it's much safer than what's currently working on that road right now, and so, from what I understand is that the city is just currently using it as a basis of design. They're telling their engineers to match it, and potentially we could see 80 to 85% of that model actually be realized.
Speaker 1:Now, that's amazing and it's great to hear too, that it's like you all are very much focused on all aspects of this in terms of like the road networks, the buildings, the like housing density, all of these things, because they all do tie so much hand in hand. And when we started this show a year ago, like we were mostly like, oh, we're going to talk about like transportation, basically just in general, we're going to talk about buses and trains, and now we talk about like housing and like the urban spaces and like you know, uh, all sorts of things.
Speaker 3:It's also closely tied together. You can't talk about housing without public transportation. You can't have good public transportation without the housing component. So it's also so interconnected.
Speaker 1:We talked about this a little bit the other night. I'm curious uh, you can share an abbreviated version if you want Just what was kind of the impetus for you starting Urban Lab.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I graduated architecture school. I kind of focused on doing graphic representations of my projects in architecture but didn't really have much of an outlet for it outside of work, right. And so I had been kind of gradually becoming more and more interested into urbanism and thought, well, maybe I can show how these urban spaces could be different. At the time I lived in Springfield, Missouri, and so I tried doing sort of these graphic representations of how to reimagine Springfield urban spaces. It was not well received At the time. I decided I'd try for Kansas City. It was much more well-received in Kansas City.
Speaker 2:I think people the hunger for change here in terms of urbanism is much greater than it was in Springfield and why it was much more successful here rather than in Springfield. I can personally attest because I had joined Urban Lab kind of just accidentally. I had seen a post that Matt had put together and said, oh my gosh, I've been talking about this exact concept but I could never quite articulate. You know why I felt this way about this specific project. And he was like well, I mean, if you want to meet up with us, we get coffee. And I said absolutely yeah, we'll do that. And you know, from there it just kind of snowballed into different people being like, hey, I have this idea. Did you guys meet up? And we've gradually grown pretty organically through that with people who have different ideas, different outlooks and how they can shape the city going forward, and it's been a huge success so far.
Speaker 3:Yeah, how he described it is very much just how the group built. It started with myself and then people started reaching out to me on social media, which is where I was posting these visualizations, and then more people started reaching out, more people started reaching out and then eventually it just became a group very organically.
Speaker 4:That's really awesome. We make a joke. This kind of made me think of this. We make a joke a couple of times throughout this podcast that, oh, if only we could change this one thing, like if I get like city skylines, like I want to, like, you know, redesign the street or whatever, you're essentially doing that in real life, like you were showing people in a almost like city skylines-esque fashion what can be a space and real change can come of that. So if you've listened to us and laughed at us, say, just city skylines, that you can do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no no, no, I think that's a really good point.
Speaker 3:I think the other thing too, like because there's a lot of local pride in Kansas City like it's one thing to show how, just like a generic intersection, for example, you know city. It's one thing to show how just a generic intersection, for example, in terms of road equity, it's one thing to show how a generic road intersection can be designed differently with bike lanes and crosswalks and whatnot. But I think when people are able to identify that and say, hey, I've been there, I've driven through there, I've walked through there, this intersection sucks, and then they see how that can be directly applied to their life, essentially in a real intersection. That's where I think a lot of the local excitement comes, and why it's been so successful is because people are familiar with what we're doing. It's not just general urbanism that can be applied anywhere in the United States, it's specifically to Kansas City.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we've done a specific corridor overlay for the Grand Boulevard corridor, which is one of the most significant streets in the entire city. It's used for parades and things like that. It's got a very historic tie to it and it's pretty desolate right now. I mean, there's parts of it that have some dense development but a lot of it's parking lots or single-rise light industrial-type buildings, storage units, and we've done an overlay with the visualizations across the entire corridor, kind of from an existing plan and how it could be better. And when people see it they're like, oh my gosh, this is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Why wouldn't we do that? I can't believe we haven't done that already. This makes so much sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It gets people to kind of push, whether it be their city council members or even the city manager or mayor, be like, hey, can we get something moving on this?
Speaker 1:something moving on this Because this visualization shows me exactly where I recognize these spaces and how they could be better. Correct me if I'm wrong here. I don't know that this was initially your proposal, but I'm sure you all are familiar with it. There was an interesting. You mentioned the amount of highway miles in the Kansas City area. There have been proposals that I've seen floating around the internet as they do, about the like North loop removal area of essentially it's a proposed highway removal. I'm curious if y'all can kind of fill us in on that. We had the chance the first day we were here. We actually like walked over the highway there in that section and it's just like imagining what was torn down to put so many of these highways in, as it is the case in basically every city in the United States. Can you walk us through what that proposal is and if you know I mean if you all are involved in it or who is involved in it? I'm just curious to learn more about it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I wish I could say that we're the ones driving it, but that's actually like a whole group, a whole other group. But we're completely supportive of that project.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the North Loop Neighbors, that's the group who's kind of headed up.
Speaker 3:What was the name of it?
Speaker 2:North Loop Neighbors.
Speaker 3:A little context to that segment of highway. So if you're not familiar with Kansas City highways, there's a downtown loop, as it's called, right and it's because there's literally a ring of highway that kind of constrained the downtown and so the north segment of that was the first segment of highway that was built in and so, like you can actually like you were talking about what got torn down, there's pictures of essentially what looks like a whole just dirt line running through the downtown at that time because it was the first highway like urban highway that was getting built and they referred to it as the Kansas City Blitz because you know, all these vets that were coming back from World War II said this looks just like Europe, you know, and that there's a lot of destroyed buildings. That just kind of happened very quickly to build this highway so that because it's such it's the oldest segment of highway, it's also one of the most poorly designed. There's too many on-ramps and off-ramps. It doesn't work for drivers very well, it doesn't facilitate traffic very well.
Speaker 3:So there's been a look to try to remove that segment because it has kind of the most bang for the buck in that river market which is just north of it, very successful Downtown just south of it, also very successful, north of it, very successful, downtown just south of it, also very successful. Connect these two very successful neighborhoods together and you know it just makes too much sense, right? It doesn't work for drivers, it doesn't work for pedestrians, it doesn't work for development. So they're kind of doing the common sense solution of just remove the north loop.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we've walked around that neighborhood and it does feel very disconnected and it would be nice to see it connected back to the city you touched on, you know, sort of the Kansas City Blitz we got to call out Segregation by Design's Instagram. If you want to see images of Kansas City, they have an amazing collection of sort of before and after pictures of development in Kansas City, specifically around the highways, and a lot of that is in this area?
Speaker 1:Absolutely, we'll also make sure that the group that you mentioned that is kind of behind this is linked in the description for folks if you're interested in learning more about that project. I'm curious if street, because it's still being kind of developed. But you know we gave them the model of that corridor.
Speaker 3:And so that's one that's still currently being underway, and my understanding is that should be coming to fruition here in the next year and a half or so. So we'll see what comes of it, but I'm pretty excited to see that.
Speaker 2:We have the Paseo West model that we've kind of been working on, say a west model that we've kind of been working on it's it's more of a longer term uh idea because we've we've done kind of an imagining of the midtown marketplace area, which is currently a big box store uh and a costco facility and a giant uh service parking lot right adjacent to the new streetcar line, uh, walking distance to a streetcar stop, and we've imagined that as a kind of an infill neighborhood long term. So we're doing that as a kind of an infill neighborhood long-term, so we're doing that with some other desolate areas around town that have kind of been forgotten or relegated to certain uses that aren't amendable to residential or commercial, and kind of showing what could be with the right policies in place or the right vision.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want to clarify a little bit on the project, Because that's more of a long-term project that we're working on right now, where this would be an example of one where we're trying to generate excitement for it, where there's currently nothing right now. So the neighborhood directly East of downtown, like the actual core of downtown, was a historically residential neighborhood. Largely African-American resided there. But because it was African-American, there's a lot of African-American population there. It was targeted for urban renewal and so the neighborhood got effectively systematically demolished and then rezoned for light industrial and so it went from being a residential neighborhood to now just being staging and light factory work. That's over there. But it's some of the highest value land, or could be some of the highest value land in the metro, because it's so close to downtown. It could be very transit accessible and then again, great views of the skyline, potentially accessible to downtown, but right now it's just mostly asphalt.
Speaker 2:Three corridors in that area as well have been studied, at least from a high level view by the streetcar for different expansions, at least from a high-level view by the streetcar for different expansions. So the long-term possibilities there are pretty substantial. With the transit accessibility that could exist and being as close to downtown as it is, it would not be hard to revitalize into a fairly thriving area.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so looking at that as reintroducing that as a residential neighborhood that can be directly accessible to downtown.
Speaker 1:I have one more, but if you go for it, if you've got anything, I have a closing one, so if you want to go ahead? Yeah, it's kind of the same, I guess, but I was going to say go for it, let's see if they were the same.
Speaker 4:For anybody else in their cities. If they want to start something similar to an Urban Labs, what advice would you give them Specifically? You know, how do you find other people who are interested in the same topics and once, once you do find those people, how do you then engage with the city and with the community and getting them excited for the things that you're excited about? This was we were on the same page.
Speaker 1:That's also my question.
Speaker 3:I think the first step, and specifically because we kind of took a very niche route I'm not familiar with many other cities that have started, you know, doing this because it's such a specific skill set being able to model buildings using like SketchUp or Rhino and then being able to use Photoshop to kind of tidy that up so that it's very professionally put together. So if anybody out there that has architectural experience or just experience modeling in general and is pretty good with Photoshop, can do what we're doing essentially, so just have the creative mind to do that and just not be afraid to put it out there. You don't have to have a group to start it, because what happened with myself, for example, is that I put these images out by myself and then people just started coming to me because they found it interesting enough. I think the other part to that too is because if you're able to do it, where again people are able to identify certain things within their cities, they get excited for it and they start reaching out from there.
Speaker 3:So I would say the step one is just start doing something you know, start putting out you know sort of your own visualizations that this is something that you're interested in doing in terms of, like working with the city. I think you have to build that reputation first before the city starts, like taking an eye to it, and then, once you go from there, you, you, you, you know. It helps to have that communication behind those scenes, cause sometimes, you know, learning about the local politics is kind of its own. Its because sometimes, you know, learning about the local politics is kind of its own beast.
Speaker 2:Can of worms, to say the least. But I mean I have no formal like architecture, design or transportation experience. I was in the Army and spent time in Europe and that's kind of where I got a feel for urbanism and different urban forms. And I came to Urban Lab, just, you know, organically, and had a knack for talking to people and that's kind of been how I've helped out. So you don't have to have a specific background within architecture, design or transportation or any of those specific fields to be able to contribute to the conversation and kind of move the ball forward. You just have to leverage whatever skill set you might have and if you really get researching things, then you can explore the history of different places and pull examples from your area and be like, hey, this is what we used to have, why can't we have it again?
Speaker 1:I totally relate to that Cause, that's I don't have a formal background or education in it. I just like was interested in it, passionate about it. I do video type works. It was like I have equipment to be able to do stuff. Chris had mentioned it and Chris does have some formal experience doing some of it.
Speaker 4:A little bit of transference, but not to this extent. Yeah, not to this extent.
Speaker 1:But it's been an interesting journey. Well, I guess if there's anything else you guys want to add, feel free. If we covered enough ground you think we're good.
Speaker 3:I mean, we could go on and talk about this for hours.
Speaker 1:So maybe we'll wrap it up For folks who are interested. How can folks find Urban Lab and like, where can they follow you all?
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're on most social media, so you can find us on Instagram, twitter, our main ones, but we're also on LinkedIn, facebook, and then our website is wwwurbanlaborg, I believe, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll make sure links to all that are in the description for folks who are interested. If you haven't liked this video already or left a comment, please consider doing so. It helps us out quite a bit. You can also support the show directly on Patreon to help get us to more places like Kansas City. This has been an awesome trip. This is probably the most extensive time we've spent in a city. Usually we're kind of in a rush doing it because it's like a mix of work and not being able to spend a bunch of money on hotels and flights and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:So thank you all for the warm welcome here. Thank you everybody for watching and enjoy the rest of your Transit Tangents Tuesday.