What is the Playbook?

A city’s comprehensive plan guides its decisions on development, investment, codes and standards, and much more for future years and future generations.

The KC Spirit Playbook (“Playbook”) is Kansas City’s comprehensive plan for the next 20 years. It’s our shared vision, based on your input gathered through public engagement, for the future of our city. It defines what the community wants the city to be and reflects the community’s values and priorities. It also is built on the understanding that our city is diverse and requires a diversity of solutions. The plan ties together and will guide future updates to the city's eighteen area plans and other citywide plans related to trails, major streets, economic development, housing, parks, and other topics.

In 2023, the City Plan Commission voted to recommend approval of the Playbook on April 18th, and the Neighborhood, Planning, and Development Committee also voted to recommend approval at their meeting on April 19th. Finally, the Playbook was officially adopted on April 20th, 2023 by the City Council.

Look around you at all the things you see – streets, buildings, houses, streams and open spaces, parks, trails, sidewalks – they’re all part of the city’s built environment. These are the design and development decisions that have been guided by past comprehensive plans. The Playbook will guide development, investment, and more for the next 20 years.

The Envisioning Statement describes how we want our city to develop in the future, in line with community values and priorities. The Supporting Vision Statements provide additional detail on the vision for Kansas City. The Supporting Equity Statements describe what what an equitable Kansas City looks like. The Vision also includes the 5 Big Ideas, which express the plans priorities and major themes.

The Goals are ten action items we must achieve to make the Vision and the Big Ideas a reality. The Goals organize the recommendations in the plan around the community’s big aspirations.

The Topics organize the plan's elements around broad subjects. They compile all information in the Playbook related to a specific topic, such as transportation, in one place. This is another way to use the Playbook - to see information on one subject throughout the plan in one place.

The Objectives provide the detailed recommendations (Community Supported Actions) for twenty-one specific subject areas. This is where all the recommendations of the plan reside.

The title "KC Spirit Playbook" is an ode to Norman Rockwell’s The Kansas City Spirit painting created to represent the city’s resilience after a major flood in Kansas City in 1951. While our imagery is a nod to the original painting, it has been updated to represent today’s Kansas City: a diverse, exciting community with a strong sense of character and tremendous pride in how far we have come.

Missouri State Statute requires that municipalities “adopt a city plan for the physical development of the municipality. The city plan, with the accompanying maps, plats, charts and descriptive and explanatory matter, shall show the commission's recommendations for the physical development and uses of land, and may include, among other things, the general location, character and extent of streets and other public ways, grounds, places and spaces; the general location and extent of public utilities and terminals, whether publicly or privately owned, the acceptance, widening, removal, extension, relocation, narrowing, vacation, abandonment or change of use of any of the foregoing; the general character, extent and layout of the replanning of blighted districts and slum areas.”

Comprehensive plans are typically built around a 20-year time horizon. It's important that the plan reflects the conditions and trends at the time it is written while remaining agile enough to address future known and unknown challenges. It’s also critical that the plan reflects the issues that are personally important to Kansas Citians. Much has changed in Kansas City since the previous comprehensive plan, the FOCUS Kansas City Plan, was adopted in 1997. The time has come to create a new comprehensive plan and make sure it addresses the issues and challenges that Kansas City faces today and those that will arise over the next two decades.

The process to create Kansas City's new comprehensive plan spanned more than three years from 2019 to 2023. An extensive report on the planning process, including a summary of the public engagement conducted as a part of this process, can be found HERE.

Kansas City’s previous comprehensive plan was the FOCUS Plan. FOCUS stands for “Forging Our Comprehensive Urban Strategy”  which was adopted in October 1997. The City of Kansas City, Missouri and its residents partnered to develop an action plan the entire community could support. The plan set priorities and guided decision-making to make Kansas City 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.

The city has done a tremendous amount of planning since the FOCUS Kansas City Plan was adopted in 1997. It was a point of emphasis throughout the comprehensive planning process to incorporate into the Playbook the many years of public feedback from the city’s various area planning and other citywide planning efforts over the past two decades. The Playbook process began with a detailed review of the FOCUS Kansas City Plan as well as the creation of a database of recommendations from every regional, citywide, and area planning document that was relevant to the comprehensive plan. These recommendations helped inform and supplement the Playbook. City staff have taken care to ensure that previous planning that is still relevant is incorporated or referenced throughout the Playbook. Staff have also made recommendations about additional planning efforts to undertake or updates to previous plans that are needed to address policy gaps, emerging issues, new best practices, and to reflect the Kansas City community’s priorities.