Lessons about urbanism from Miami

I returned yesterday after five days in Miami.

My trip was for “work.” Not conference “work,” which (for me) isn’t really work at all but three, four, sometimes five days with soft obligations (like one 90-minute panel, sometimes two, in which my own presentation constitutes about 15 minutes of speaking) and plenty of free time for socializing and other sorts of fun. This was four very intense days of data collection for a project that I’ve been enlisted for. I’ve done very little applied research in my career, and this is very neat. I hope that I can keep this shingle hung outside my door permanently, on a part-time basis I mean. It’s all really fulfilling.

So “work” was engaging and exhausting and didn’t leave me much time- any time, really- to explore Miami. I only got to know my very nice hotel room and the route from there to the study site, which entailed perhaps 10 minutes of walking through downtown. I also had two meals at the Bayside Marketplace, which is a “festival marketplace” with all the trappings that this label implies. Hard Rock? Check. Bubba Gump? Check. Disney Store? Check. I actually had some serviceable Cuban food (stewed pork with rice and black beans) at the food court there, and it wasn’t unpleasant.

The thing is, Miami challenges some of the lessons about urbanism that planners (among other urbanists) take for granted, because the “urbanity” of downtown Miami just doesn’t seem to work. Is downtown “urban”? Most definitely. Miami has an abundance–an absurd abundance, in fact–of residential projects going up in and around downtown. It’s reminiscent of Vancouver or Honolulu (or Calgary) in that regard, and for a skyscraper geek, it’s inspiring. With this buildout, one would expect to find the street-level amenities and street life to reflect that population boom. And here’s where the story goes in an unexpected direction, and there are some concrete reasons for that.

1. Miami is overbuilt. This is probably not only the case downtown, but one can see it acutely downtown. The towers under construction are largely unsold; completed towers are largely empty; planned towers are being cancelled all over the place; speculators are losing money (LOTS of money); even developers are forced to cut prices (I saw 30% markdowns on unsold units, something I’ve never seen in Calgary except for the very last unit in an otherwise sold-out project); and the bottom line is that Miami is the centre of the US burst-bubble mortgage crisis. So, yes, there are buildings, but they don’t lend to an urban (meaning “peopled” in this case) atmosphere. It’s all surreal and kind of sad.

2. There isn’t a lot going on at the street level. We complain about this sort of thing in Calgary a lot, but I saw nothing in the way of retail, storefront, streetside retail, that was in any way commensurate with what I saw above the street. We worked on Saturday and Sunday, and I could only see open businesses in the hotels. Yes, Bayside was open, but Bayside is basically a mall. A special sort of mall, but a mall. I saw nothing inviting at street level despite the presence of huge, HUGE hotels and thousands of guests there, all seemingly scurrying for cabs and tour buses. The Starbucks in my hotel had an interior entrance in a sort of retail court in the hotel, not a streetfront entrance like at the new Starbucks in Calgary’s downtown Westin. All of this lent to a pretty much pedestrian-free, and empty and dangerous-feeling, urban environment.

3. The pedestrian experience in Downtown Miami, for the route(s) that I attempted from hotel to meeting site, was very unwelcoming, and was at times terrifying. Part of this was because of the lack of other street life, including other pedestrians. Another part, perhaps a larger one, was that pedestrians have to compete with cars in a ridiculously one-sided battle. I had no choice at several places to cross at unmarked intersections or, for heaven’s sake, to cross in the middle of the street. Then I had to race against three or four lanes of one-way traffic. Then I had to contend with the fact that those lanes of traffic are all racing- RACING- to get onto the expressway. A colleague and I once crossed one of those unmarked intersections when the coast was clear, and a left-turning car stopped to let us cross without being killed. At this point a truck behind that car laid on its horn. He could see quite clearly why the car had stopped, but the message was clear: You don’t give pedestrians the right of way, and that experience, more than any other, soured me on Miami.

I’m sure there are areas around Miami, maybe even in the city proper, that are wonderful and even pedestrian friendly and all of that. But what I learned from my limited experience there is not really about Miami at all. It’s about the importance of factors, sometimes unanticipated ones, in making an area walkable, and “walkability” lends to livability. For me, at least.

It’s great to be home.