Placemaking · South Vine
Rebuild the neighborhood on the identity it already owns.
Placemaking here does not mean amenities. It means rebuilding a neighborhood on the identity it already carries. This is South Vine as I see it: the performing arts neighborhood of Kansas City — and a global neighborhood for creativity. The claim is not aspiration. This is the ground that produced one of the great American art forms, celebrated by over a thousand jazz festivals around the world every year. The world already knows what this neighborhood is. The work is to make the neighborhood itself run on it again.
The machine builds the homes. Placemaking is why people come home.
012014
The Castle
The 1897 Workhouse Castle at 20th and Vine — forty-two tons of debris, several hundred volunteers, a work-prison turned wedding venue. The first proof the neighborhood would show up for itself. The 1988 blueprints found in the Black Archives made it a resumption, not an invention.
022015–2016
The world travel
Six countries, nine cities, twenty-seven days — the Kemper-funded Listening Campaign, studying how the world's celebrated creative districts actually run, and seeing first-hand how the world celebrates what this community created.
032016–2017
JazzLP · Record To Rebuild
The model the tour brought home: culture before real estate — back the neighborhood's working artists first. Hermon Mehari's debut album Bleu went to #1 worldwide on the iTunes Jazz chart, with twelve additional projects behind it.
042024
In Good Company
The hospitality concept at 1518 McGee, co-owned with Cedric Ransburg — recruiting the neighborhood back around its identity, one room where it gathers.
05In the works
Kansas City Music Office
Newly in the works
Not building anything new — aggregating the isolated pieces that already exist across the city (artists, venues, studios, stages, festivals) into one industry, and locating that industry in South Vine.
The identity was never lost. It was isolated. Placemaking is the aggregation.
The production system behind the neighborhood is at Scale-Built Housing. The receipts are at The Record.