KC Spirit Playbook - updating Kansas City's Comprehensive Plan

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The City Planning and Development Department is leading an update of the city's Comprehensive Plan. We are calling this new plan the “KC Spirit Playbook” (or “Playbook” for short). This plan sets priorities and serves as a guide for the future physical development of our City. Our goal is to ensure Kansas City, Missouri is a thriving, people-centered community and a successful model for other American cities to follow for future generations.

Why update the plan?

Comprehensive plans typically use a 20 to 30 year time horizon. Our current comprehensive plan FOCUS was adopted 23 years ago, in 1997, and

The City Planning and Development Department is leading an update of the city's Comprehensive Plan. We are calling this new plan the “KC Spirit Playbook” (or “Playbook” for short). This plan sets priorities and serves as a guide for the future physical development of our City. Our goal is to ensure Kansas City, Missouri is a thriving, people-centered community and a successful model for other American cities to follow for future generations.

Why update the plan?

Comprehensive plans typically use a 20 to 30 year time horizon. Our current comprehensive plan FOCUS was adopted 23 years ago, in 1997, and Kansas City has changed in the meantime. The Playbook update is meant to achieve several objectives including:

  • To reinforce citywide policies and practices that have a relationship to the City's physical and built environment
  • Understand how, when, and why we further grow since we are a city that is not fully built out
  • To assure KCMO can appropriately respond to environmental and technological changes related to how we live, work, and play
  • To maintain the City's preeminent role in the KC Metro
  • To compete nationally to attract new businesses and investments

Where Does The Name "KC Spirit Playbook" Come From?

We have named the updated plan The KC Spirit Playbook, an ode to Norman Rockwell’s “The Kansas City Spirit” painting created to represent the city’s resilience in after a major flood in Kansas City in 1951.

What's the City's Current Plan?

FOCUS (Forging Our Comprehensive Urban Strategy) is Kansas City’s current Comprehensive Plan adopted in October 1997. The City of Kansas City, Missouri and its residents partnered to develop an action plan the entire community can support. The plan sets priorities and guides decisions to assure Kansas City is a thriving, people-centered community and a successful model for other American cities to follow for future generations.

Seven distinct, but interwoven component plans were developed to detail the action steps needed to make the FOCUS vision and policy principles a reality.

Neighborhood self-assessments were performed as a part of the FOCUS process. There were two objectives for neighborhoods during these self-evaluations: to self-identify its neighborhood type from the FOCUS Neighborhood Prototypes Plan and to develop improvement strategies that would direct neighborhood improvement, a “To Do” list/Action Steps incorporating participation by the neighborhood, community partners, and the City.


Read the FOCUS Plan here