I’ve been slowly but surely evolving towards an environmental activist since reading James Howard Kunstler’s brilliant book The Geography of Nowhere. In the book, he outlines the ways in which our car-centric culture has decimated urban life, city life, from coast-to-coast, and how that focus has resulted in places that we aren’t proud of, places that are more unpleasant to live than those that came before. Combine that with being scared shitless by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” and you have me living less than a mile from work, walking nearly everywhere. My carbon footprint is down to air conditioning, cable and computer.

You may be asking, how does the former (a focus on New Urbanism,) relate to the environmental concerns of the latter? Well, in an obvious way, less suburban sprawl means less destroyed forests and green space, less dependence on the car…and less dependence on oil to power the cars and ‘Venus’ the atmosphere. That’s the ‘traditional’ form of environmentalism…the ‘tree-hugger’ stereotype. My argument is that we need to expand our idea of what the environment is, and move from merely “making every day Earth Day” to a focused effort on protecting the human, artificial world from a serious case of the fuglies.

In short, it’s not merely about the natural environment, but also the urban environment and the social environment. We, the people, are both liberated and imprisoned by our cars. The liberty of going wherever you want on a timetable of your own choosing entirely shackles us to one mode of transportation, which in turn, jails us to one mode of development. Now, don’t get me wrong…I like a great many things about the modern era. It totally pisses me off that of all of the things I can get to on foot or rail in Washington DC…I still have to drive to a goddamn Target. And I love Target! Add an ‘Archer Farms’ and make it a SuperTarget, please.

But here’s the thing: have you ever seen a typical SuperTarget parking lot? It makes logical sense to have one, since everybody going to Target has to drive there, but damn! You could land a plane right next to the cart caddies. And to walk from your parking space to the entrance kind of defeats the purpose of the convenience of the car, no? Worse still, engaging in a game of ‘find the closest spot’ seems to suck away the convenience of time, no? So, why not build a parking deck in every SuperTarget parking lot? Because it’s cheaper and easier to just tar over four zillion acres, that’s why.

When did we become the ‘cheap and easy’ culture, exactly? Our forefathers sent people to the moon! Walt Disney spared no expense to show us the magic of his kingdoms. To look around the decaying (or in some cases, decimated…destroyed) traditional urban centers of America is to witness the rejection of the ‘hard and expensive’ culture of our past. For example, there is an entire website devoted to ‘touring Detroit’s ruins.’

I never realized how beautiful downtown Detroit is…was. I just thought it was the city where Eminem first pretended to be black, where gleaming cars came out of factories onto highways that stretched out into the country. Who knew that Detroit was actually a ‘real place,’ with stunning architecture that was admired the world over…before it became the living movie set for ‘Shaft?’

Detroit is a particularly cruel example of senium urbanus, being that the Motor City rivaled the best, most successful cities the world over, a viable competitor for New York, a place hailed as the “Paris of the Midwest.” But I’m sure many people know this situation well, personalizing it to the locale of their birth. Most urban centers in the United States are mere shells, empty husks of their former, vital selves. For many people of my generation and later (I’m a mid-seventies baby,) we only know the dead, having spent our entire youth in the ring of suburbs desiccating the core.

This is even true of Sunbelt cities, like my hometown-by-proxy, Miami. One could make an argument that the Magic City never really had much of an urban center to wreck…and you’d be right. Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach and their respective counties have been defined, practically from the beginning, as sprawl. For example, Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami, was developed practically at the same time as the core city. In Broward County, is the central city Fort Lauderdale, or Hollywood? Or are both ‘suburbs’ of Miami (which technically came later, but anyway.)

From a distance, downtown Miami looks spectacular. Skyscrapers designed with typical Floridian whimsy brush the clouds by day, and cast a purple glow for miles by night. Get closer and you see the problem: there’s no life in downtown Miami. Sure, plenty of bankers and lawyers and international business types occupy the towers by day, but rarely do they venture to the streets. And at night, downtown is a ghost town. Dead by sunset.

To be fair, Miami has tried valiantly to jump-start their Central Business District, with mixed success. The Metrorail does deposit scores of workers into the CBD, only to watch them flood out at the end of the day. They built a Disney-like ‘Metromover,’ which links the three main components of downtown together (and is the best theme park ride in the state.) They located one of the finest arts schools in the country downtown, bringing some students into the district. They built Bayside, an open-market shopping district, overlooking Biscayne Bay, and added two basketball arenas as well.

Collectively, all of their efforts never really gelled into a cohesive whole. Tourists went to the touristy shit. Students went to school. Employees went to work. Nobody went to live.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Stunning, modern and very ‘Miami’ looking high-rises began to define the southern portion of the downtown area, known as 'Brickell,' attracting wealthy residents looking for a slice of Miami Vice. But…there’s a catch: these are car-centric buildings, set back from the main drag, gated and guarded. What’s more, for many years, Brickell had no shops and stores to speak of. Imagine living next to a downtown, and driving to the suburbs for shopping. While things have begun to change, for many years, Brickell was merely a suburb in the sky (a South Florida specialty: see Aventura.)

And while nobody was moving to downtown to live, the people left behind were living…rough. Indeed, who would want to live there…by choice, anyway? Not the middle-classes, who built a string of suburbs from the coast to the edge of the Everglades. When I say I’m from Miami, I’m really from 25 miles south and west of Miami. When my family moved to Fort Lauderdale, they really moved about 20 minutes north and west of that ‘city.’ Who is really from Miami, anyway?

Most of us are like that: using the primary city to define the overall place, even if we, the people, never visit the center. Most of us, born and raised in the suburbs and exurbs, wouldn’t really know what a real city was, anyway. South Florida, because of its limited land area, is much more urban and dense than almost every other metro area in the country, is more likely to be defined as a ‘city,’ and yet, is anything but.

You’d think that we, the people (or in my case, former person,) wouldn’t know a true slice of urban pie if it landed on our lap. And then came Mizner Park.

Mizner Park was born out of an old, failed mall in ‘downtown’ Boca Raton. For many places in South Florida, the moniker ‘downtown’ meant little more than window dressing, a way to delineate where the origin of the sprawl began. Boca Raton, which had a small, undeveloped downtown at its inception, spread rapidly to the Everglades. People who live 15 miles from ‘Boca Raton’ still claim residency in Boca Ration. Downtown was dead.

Until Mizner Park.

By combining shops, retail and housing in a mixed-use pattern, Mizner Park became the first new slice of truly urban living built in South Florida. The development not only became a tourist attraction, it defined Boca Raton. If you visit nearly any site dedicated to the city, Mizner Park is the image relayed to the rest of the world…and the rest of South Florida.

We, the people, flocked to Mizner Park like children to Disneyland. Mind you, Boca Raton is a wealthy community, so the shops at ground level sell wares that are pretty much out-of-reach for nearly everybody but a Bill Gates clone…and yet, everybody went to the Starbucks just for the honor of sitting at a table overlooking the green space bisecting ‘Mizner Park Boulevard.’ Time has shown that Mizner Park has been a tremendous success, not only rescuing a useless mall plot from oblivion, but in spurring a downtown in Boca Raton where there was none before. Now visitors and residents will find Mizner Park as the centerpiece of many blocks of mixed-use, Mizner Park-inspired development, all new…all urban, and most importantly, all local: when you are in downtown Boca Raton, you are someplace, rather than no place.

Mizner Park inspired other developments throughout South Florida, including the aforementioned Bayside in downtown Miami. Coconut Grove gentrified around ‘CocoWalk,’ a Mizner-lite ‘lifestyle development,’ that nonetheless encouraged truly urban development around the glorified mall. A similar outdoor mall, RiverFront, acted as the catalyst for waking up downtown Fort Lauderdale. But neither RiverFront nor CocoWalk (and especially not Bayside) were truly urban, truly mixed-use developments. None held a candle to Mizner Park.

But then, another extraordinary event happened, the revival and rebirth of South Beach. This area of Miami Beach had languished for decades as the home of old people, drug addicts, and brave gays who appreciated the concentration of Art Deco architecture. The gays dug in and began to attract business and residents back to the sleepy little beachfront city. Soon, it became a locals' secret: tourists rarely ventured to South Beach, but South Floridians did. Unlike Mizner Park, nothing was ‘built’ there to resemble a real urban place…people just moved back or visited a real urban place.

You know the rest of the story. South Beach is now a major international destination, a hub of the modeling, film and tourist industry. South Beach is synonymous with style and architecture…but what people forget, or perhaps don’t realize…is that South Beach is incredibly urban, walkable and liveable. It’s one of the few places in South Florida not requiring a car. You can live and work and play on South Beach and never go to the mainland, never hop in your SUV, and never experience the boredom of suburbia.

This success inspired the older, vacated downtowns along South Florida’s eastern edge to begin their own renewal efforts. A sleepier version of South Beach, Palm Beach County’s Delray Beach, had also been revived, and demonstrates that one doesn't need models and slick club addicts to create a beautiful downtown district. Like South Beach, much of Delray’s resurgence doesn't involve new buildings. The spaces were already there…they were just waiting for people. And we, the people, came back.

Downtown Hollywood soon followed suit, now in the midst of its own gentrification. Much like South Beach in the late 1980s, Hollywood still has the grit of decades of neglect, but since South Beach proved the effort rewards dividends, the cost of grit has gone up exponentially. Nearly all traditional, forgotten downtowns now have a plan in place to use what they have to get people back there. It’s pretty amazing, really.

None of these plans have had more ambition, or impact than Downtown West Palm Beach. A combination of Mizner Park-like new construction and a retrofit of old, historical buildings, the multi-block, multi-million dollar effort has changed the face of downtown. Something old, something new…all of it comes together in downtown West Palm Beach.

All of this would be remarkable in and of itself. Detroit, for example, would be happy with one little smidgen of this downtown renewal. But where the South Florida story really gets interesting is in the suburbs. Take Kendall in Miami-Dade county. The unincorporated area is home to like 800,000 people, and it stretches from US-1 in the east all the way to the Everglades. Kendall reads like a storybook lesson in the success and the dangers of sprawl. It is truly no place…as far as the eye can see.

The one touchstone, or ‘location’ in Kendall that could be defined as a center (and this is pushing the definition to the absolute limit) would be Dadeland Mall, an enclosed monstrosity of shopping, dining and parking. If you lived in and around Kendall, you shopped at Dadeland Mall. I was practically raised there! Dadeland Mall is quite popular and profitable…and part of the problem. With nearly a million people shopping there on a regular basis, and only one real way to get there (the car, of course,) you can imagine the traffic on Kendall Drive. It’s monstrous, to say the least.

The traffic is made worse by having two Metrorail stops right around the corner. Now normally, mass transit would reduce traffic…but the train runs from Dadeland to downtown (north and south,) instead of from Dadeland through Kendall (east and west.) So all the downtown commuters going to work from Kendall drive to Dadeland, making Kendall Drive a slow moving crawl towards US-1.

Future plans are on the boards to run a Metrorail line through Kendall, but that still doesn’t solve the problem of Dadeland being merely a mall and a Metrorail hub. How can Kendall increase their housing stock, create more of a market for their money-making mall, and use their closeness to mass transit more effectively?

Why, by building an entire downtown from nothing, of course!

In short, Miami-Dade County is creating someplace out of no place. Suburbia is retrofitted into real urban fabric. And this is happening all over South Florida. Coral Springs is building a downtown. As is Sunrise (defined by the largest outlet mall in the country, Sawgrass Mills.) Plantation, one of South Florida’s original sprawltastic suburbs, is mimicking the Downtown Kendall development around the Broward Mall. Everywhere you look, South Florida is trying to build centers of living, of interaction, out of the fabric of car-centric development. And succeeding.

Here’s what I mean. The Walk in Coral Springs is essentially a retrofit of an existing and dead strip mall. It’s not a real downtown, in that you can’t live there, but you can shop there, and you can work there. There are downtown elements, like a fountain centerpiece, pocket parks and benches…and the ‘look’ of a Main Street, if not the actual substance. When proposed, a few residents objected to The Walk, claiming it was a boondoggle…that Mizner Park in the Springs would never work.

Surprise. Even in its truncated, limited form, The Walk is the place to be in Coral Springs. At present, it’s the de facto center of town, where the art fairs are held, where friends meet for lunch, where residents go to buy a book, sit by the fountain, and enjoy the ambience…and The Walk is little more than a block of glorified mall! But the residents of Coral Springs have now experienced what a true slice of urbanity could look like in their suburb, and are now moving forward with the real deal…a true, mixed-use ‘downtown’ carved out of four blocks of strip mall ugliness.

The point here is that New Urbanism works. South Florida is merely at the first stage…creating something out of nothing: urban centers floating in the sea of suburbia. The next phase would be to link up those centers with transit…and, almost as incredibly, this is happening as well. Miami-Dade County is expanding their Metrorail system by another 25 some odd miles initially, with plans to increase the tracks to more than 100 miles total. The South Florida Regional Transportation Authority, which runs Tri-Rail, is looking to expand their transit operations west throughout the three counties. Will this succeed? And what will this mean for the dead-after-seven downtown Miami?

Well, for starters, downtown Miami must get its own act together, to invest in becoming a true urban hub, a place of pride among the citizenry. This is already happening…with over 15 billion dollars worth of investment in the core. But it’s the future where South Florida will really prove to be an example. In ten years, the major cities of the region should have built, retrofitted or gentrified their downtowns into places to live, work and play. If the transit keeps up with the trend, South Floridians will again have a choice: drive by car or ride the rails from one center to the next. This makes the possibility of an accessible, beautiful downtown Miami all the more realistic. Connection encourages interaction and commerce.

The South Florida ‘project’ is well underway, and not a moment too soon. If the model for sprawl can become the model for urban living and design, than the rest of the United States can follow suit…can create someplace from no place. Can save the environment and reduce our dependency on oil. Can use our vast tracts of land in a more efficient manner, from growing crops to growing food (and with China basically building everything else, we, the people, need to realize that our future purchasing power is based on our bread basket…on our crops.)

Perhaps most importantly, we, the people, will see and interact with one another again. We’ll tear the gates down and get out into the world we created. And we can leave road rage behind for more worthy pursuits of our civic time.

Welcome to the future…it's happening today in the Sunshine State.

 

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