Kansas City‘s Country Club Plaza has to be more than just a strip mall | Opinion

I never expected to spend three years in Kansas City, and yet somewhere along the way I became deeply invested in the past, present and future of the Country Club Plaza. That investment led me to work for a nonprofit representing Plaza stakeholders, an entity with an organizational flaw that turned out to matter enormously: It had no actual authority over the very space KC residents most want to talk about.

And they do want to talk about it. Whether I’m working at a retail shop on the Plaza or sitting in community meetings, the questions are always the same: Why are stores closing? Who are the new owners? When does the renaissance happen? The investment Kansas Citians have in this place is something genuinely unusual, and the very fuel to push for a true transformation of the spatial purpose.

The Plaza has a real history worth celebrating. It was a genuine placemaking achievement, designed to absorb the car culture of suburban sprawl without surrendering to a sea of surface parking, and to function as a community gathering place for suburb-dwellers. That vision deserves acknowledgment, even alongside the Plaza’s role in Kansas City’s history of racial exclusion.

By the 1980s, a second era had taken hold. Capitalism and consumption took over, and the Plaza became something closer to a mall: glitzy, identity-driven and oriented entirely around retail.

That identity has now largely been diminished. Mall culture has been in a long-term decline, and the Plaza is no different. What’s required isn’t a refresh. It’s a fundamental shift in purpose. The Plaza needs to stop being an outdoor mall dressed in Spanish Revival architecture and start being what its name actually implies: a plaza. Gillon Property Group faces real pressure to redevelop for profit, but profit and revitalization are not the same thing. Without the vision of planners and placemakers who can insist on community activation over pure retail, the investment will fail on both counts.

The plaza, the town square, the civic heart: these are some of the oldest ideas in city planning. They don’t exist primarily to extract money from people, but to give people a reason to be present together. The Country Club Plaza still lives in Kansas City’s imagination because people sense that echo. The Plaza Art Fair turns it into a genuine cultural hub for one weekend a year. Generations of families remember making the trip to watch the Christmas lights turn on every Thanksgiving night.

But two events a year do not make a place. What remains in between is a beautiful shell, Spanish tile and fountains wrapped around a retail structure holding shops and restaurants that many people lack the draw to visit and exist in regularly.

Despite all this, people crave to be in this space in a different way. The aesthetic draw is real. The bones are extraordinary. But wanting to exist somewhere and having a reason to return are different things. Without programming, activation and a reorientation toward community rather than consumption, the Country Club Plaza will remain exactly what it has quietly become: a strip mall that Kansas City has been calling something else for 40 years.

Brian Thomas is a cultural and creative enterprise academic with a background in nonprofit place management leadership and a vested interest in the experiential and community-centric revitalization and development of historic districts. He is the former operations manager of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Plaza District Council.

This story was originally published March 22, 2026 at 5:07 AM.