Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Jason Brody / There are six square miles of vacant land spread throughout Downtown Kansas City unkempt and untouched for the fear of what may exist in the soil, air, and water and the consequences that come with it (COR Team 2010, EPA 1997). Not developing the vacant/underutilized land causes more harm than good for the city, the locals, and the environment. It costs the city loss of tax revenue (Holt 2002). It hurts locals’ property values and possibly health. It inhibits the environment’s functions with potential toxins. By activating vacant/underutilized land through phytoremediation and redevelopment, it can meet the needs of the projected population growth in the next 30 years, accommodate the Rock Island Corridor, and dissolve any threats of contamination. With the threat of possible contamination on the vacant/underutilized land, surrounding properties, and industrial properties within the culturally rich Jazz and Crossroads districts downtown, phytoremediation is used as a continuation of the Rock Island Corridor’s linear park system and transit in the city context while allowing for redevelopment. The strategy examines regional to site specific strategies where phytoremediation is used to connect people to the environment, contain contaminant-producing places, and counteract contamination from new development. The development serves as a model for Kansas City to use the Rock Island Corridor to control site-specific problems as a catalyst for redevelopment of districts to solve large-scale issues through the use of phytoremediation. Phytoremediation allows for light contaminant production industries to remain functional and rely on phytoremediation to clean some of the waste to prevent excessive clean up in the future. With the help of the phytoremediation and development, it allows for us to understand how phytoremediation works while preventing sites from becoming vacant/underutilized urban areas for the betterment of the community as a proactive strategy to prevent brownfields. Phytoremediation supports sustainable preventative/remediation strategies while catering to community needs such as redevelopment along Rock Island Corridor and Common Line, multi-modal transit, Metrogreen, character of place, and city life. It blends site suitability with community needs, while creating a cleaner more efficient environment that is aesthetically appealing.

Master of Landscape Architecture or Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Timothy Keane / Kansas City is expecting a 25% growth in population by 2050. This design proposal promotes West Bottoms as a potential area to house some of the new population, and more importantly supply a live and work community for these people. West Bottoms is also home to major industry in Kansas City as well as an up and coming art culture. West Bottoms has great potential for a community that allows the existing and new population to be a part of a live-work-play community with the vacancies in the area. The projected population growth is expected to promote sprawl, further increasing the average driving time to the city. West Bottoms currently has few connections to the downtown and offers few reasons to come to the area. These connections are mainly major bridges or highways. Another issue West Bottoms faces is flooding problems from OK Creek and Turkey Creek, which lead into the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. Finally, post and present industrial soil contamination threatens the groundwater. When mixed with flooding concerns, this contamination is potentially harmful for the health of downstream cities. Drawing inspiration from travels, Kansas City charm, plants, art, and water storage, case studies were researched. Themes from each case study were quantified. These themes paired with inventory and analysis of the West Bottoms provided the basis for the design proposed here. The successional design of the area will progress from a contaminated landscape to a landscape that holds floodwater. The final design holds all of the stormwater from the 100 year 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, and 24 hour rain events. The final design incorporates areas of learning, a variety of paths and seating, a live-work-play community, clean and creative industry, and an art culture that sustains the excitement for the timeline of succession. Overtime this landscape will evolve into a new destination for Kansas City using an integrated solution remediating the soil and holding flood waters as an amenity for the new population.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Environmental Design & Planning Program / Lee R. Skabelund / The Restorative Urban Design (RUD) calls for a new urban design and planning approach targeting environmentally responsible re/development of urbanized areas through ecologically responsive impact mitigations. If implemented in a systematic manner, such re/developments can help move urban areas toward the successful restoration of the natural environment of which they are an inseparable part. The RUD model advocates more rigorous assessment and mitigation of urban impacts by carefully evaluating the environmental performance of urban re/developments within five primary dimensions: Atmosphere (emissions, pollutants, ozone depletion); Hydrosphere (stormwater, domestic water, wastewater); Lithosphere (land use, land cover, food and wastes); Ecology (habitat resilience, biodiversity, population and resources); and Energy (renewability, reduction and efficiency, transportation). The model relies on a scenario-comparison process in order to evaluate and optimize the performance of urban re/development projections through four critical scenarios, which are respectively: 1) Natural Baseline (NBASE); 2) Historic Progression (HPROG); 3) Trajectory Forecast (TFORE); and 4) Restorative Projection (RPROJ). The RUD Case Study illustrates how the principles and strategies of Restorative Urban Design can be applied specifically to a typical (densely developed) urban area, namely River North District in Chicago Metropolitan Area. The case study focuses exclusively on mitigation of a single critical human impact on the natural environment: Anthropogenic CO₂ Emissions. The case study focuses on the design assumptions by which the restorative urban re/development scenarios might exceed beyond the full mitigation of emissions into the global remediation by 2040. The restorative projections illustrate that only a certain portion of emissions can be effectively mitigated onsite (5 to 55%), and that the remainder of projected emissions (45 to 95%) need to be mitigated offsite in order to achieve the necessary sequestration and storage. The restorative research suggests that the mitigation of major human impacts on the natural environment – not only CO₂ emissions but also other major impacts – are likely to require significant urban transformations. Moving beyond the strategies of preservation and/or conservation, the restorative approach asserts that comprehensive environmental restoration is achievable if urban impacts are adequately estimated and then entirely mitigated onsite as well as offsite through a systematic process of urban re/development.