Miami and South Florida in 2050 A Dispatch from the Future

© CURTIS & ROGERS DESIGN STUDIO/SWIRE PROPERTIES

Sea Wall Rendering

Local real estate developer Swire Properties commissioned an alternative sea wall plan for the City of Miami. It is more complicated than a simple concrete barrier: It involves multiple levels; it catches water and pushes it back into the sea; there’s vegetation, oyster beds, and mangroves, and it would create a kind of amenity for the city.

MIAMI IN 2050

A DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE

BY JASON KING

Even though it is situated in one of the most vulnerable places on Earth, Miami’s focus on climate mitigation and adaptation puts it ahead of cities with twice its natural advantages.

Miami is on the front line of climate change— but innovations and solutions are born on the front line. And if Greater Miami is the front line, Miami Beach is the front of the front line. It’s an offshore barrier island where we used to experience dramatic sunny-day flooding. Eventually, news cameras appeared to communicate a lesson to the rest of the world: Climate change is coming.

In 2013, Rolling Stone published an article, “Goodbye, Miami,” saying that by century’s end, rising sea levels will turn the urban fantasyland into an Atlantis. People seemed to delight in the idea that Miami was on its way out. But quite the opposite: Miami is working hard to survive—and has been doing that for a long time. The beach that makes Miami Beach famous was built in the ’80s on a kind of levee with concrete underneath the sand that pushed the ocean out a quarter-mile.

In the mid-2010s, the city started lifting streets, placing pumps underneath to solve the flooding problem. The roads were suddenly not flooding anymore. Eventually, leaders paused the effort and reoriented toward a less expensive but, ultimately, ineffectual approach. It is understandable: Taxpayers had a hard time with $100 million general obligation bonds and were tired of living in construction zones.

But experts kept saying the same thing: You’re in an existential moment; you have to do what you can. Then the city started to pivot, and there were new funding mechanisms to pay for lifting, draining, and pushing back the ocean. Then, the mainland started to get serious, and the Army Corps of Engineers drafted a plan to wall off a large part of the city. It was expensive and brutally ugly.

Real estate developer Swire Properties commissioned an alternative plan to turn the wall into a kind of promenade. People started to imagine large breakwater islands in Biscayne Bay to stop the 25-foot waves expected with certain storm conditions.

Was this enough? No. In 2014, the City of Miami called in experts from around the world to the South Florida Resilient Design Workshop, for which I designed what I call the Virginia Key Boulevard levee that attempted to solve the problem with a large construction of new land along Virginia Key that would provide all the gates, pumps, and elevated land we’d seen in other projects. I still can’t tell whether it’s a bad idea or an idea whose time has simply not come.

Around the world, there are climate change success stories. My book is about those stories. We need to think about the short term, midterm, and long term. We need to look at the future the way someone with a terminal disease does: with dignity, self-compassion, value, and hope. And we need to have a good bedside manner. We need to preach a gospel of resilience and optimism. No one and nothing lasts forever. Let’s not dwell on that. Let’s do what we can to live as long as we can.

Jason King

Principal, Dover, Kohl & Partners

Miami, Florida

Jason King, AICP, is a city planner who has directed multidisciplinary teams around the world. He has served as the project director on over 200 plans for cities, towns, neighborhoods, and corridors. From the first plan he worked on for Thailand’s Tarutao Islands to multiple plans in coastal Louisiana, Southeast Florida, and the American Southwest, King’s work has focused on social, economic, and climate change resilience. He is the author of the book The Climate Planner.