Kemet Coleman, a local musician, urbanist and co-owner of Vine Street Brewing Co., thinks Kansas City is in need of a rebrand. “The brand right now is City of Fountains, and it needs to be City of Music,” Coleman says.
Many cities of a similar size and musical significance, like New Orleans, Memphis and Nashville, have booming entertainment industries supported by their local city governments, according to Anita Dixon-Brown, executive director and founder of Creative City KC. KC has the history and talent to be a comparable tourism destination, but the infrastructure to support that has not materialized organically, despite being given the honor as a United Nations-designated City of Music in 2017, the first in North America at the time. A few months ago, New Orleans was also granted the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization City of Music designation, making it the second North American city to have the title. KC’s UNESCO program is led by the nonprofit organization CCKC.
KC’s UNESCO application process was a collaboration between Dixon-Brown and Jacob Wagner, the director of UMKC’s Urban Studies program. Wagner is now the coordinator of the UNESCO Creative Cities music sub-network for the next two years. “Kansas City of today is very different from the Kansas City we grew up in, where there were a lot more festivals, there was more consistency, more kind of permanence,” says Wagner. He’d like to see that Kansas City again…