Written by: Anniston Upton, Corbin Spalding, Cadence Byrd and Yoseph Negash. KC Design Interns from ProX Kauffman Center High School Program

This summer, us interns at KCDC decided to build a pop-up park to bring public awareness to the positive possibilities of our underutilized public parks throughout Kansas City. Our catalyst to bring awareness was the increased street traffic from across the globe coming for the FIFA World Cup. Therefore, we chose our opening day to be during the first match held in Kansas City.

Opening Day

Thanks to the Argentina vs Algeria Match, we had a high level of foot traffic throughout the park. The games we had set up prior to the start of our event gained immense popularity and activity throughout the day. Our park social event even attracted a popular argentinian music film crew. Additionally, the food truck we brought in drew in people during lunch hours.

Bike Cart

We brought our bike cart which contains cornhole, ladder toss, soccer goals, a soccer ball, and tic-tac-toe boards. We used that to set up yard games for citizens and visitors to enjoy. This gave families and fans an opportunity to stay active, have fun and make connections with other people!

Park Social

Our Visitors interacted with our event in many different ways:

Algerian and Argentinian fans as well as people from our local community consistently participated in soccer games in our mini field.
On our Information table we also had a paper where visitors could write down their hometowns.
Furthermore, we saw heightened traffic during the lunch hours where local food trucks like Cafe Ca Phe and Taco Cacao attracted locals to come to our park during their lunch break.
Expanding the demographic: Accidently, we left our chalk bucket on the floor, to our advantage however, families with toddlers and smaller children were able to fit into our park social drawing coloring and drawing art on the park ground.

Days 2-4

After a successful opening day, we noticed that the amount of foot traffic flowing through our park started to decrease due to there being no World Cup game being hosted inside of the city. On the third day, we collaborated with the city's art in the loop program adding in more food trucks and live music performances to our park social. Usually only families and smaller groups would interact with our games, however, we did notice increased amounts of people during the lunch hour due to the food trucks.

On the fourth day we noticed that although our specific park games saw the least amount of traffic compared to other days, the Oppenstein park itself held above average foot traffic and socializing. People from work would eat their lunch in the park, have conversations or simply get coffee from our coffee stand. We saw this as a major success due to it revealing that the community itself was interacting with the park as a whole, not just our pop up.

Throughout the social, we ran into issues with our design each day based on weather conditions. When it was windy our goals would have to be staked in mulch rather than free on the field, and when it was rainy we’d have to cover all the games as well as the bike resulting in us post-poning our social. However, despite these inconveniences, we adapted and refined our layout accordingly.

Oppenstein Park by ProX Interns