Miami: Mistress of the Americas

Chapter 9: The First Hemispheric City

c h a p t e r 9 The First Hemispheric City To outside observers, visitors, and even residents, Miami’s unique qualities are readily apparent: the balmy weather, the scenery somewhere between ostentatious and seductive, edgy behaviors , and the occasional surreal spectacle are all hard to ignore. Miami, to be sure, can be uniquely entertaining. The city’s penchant for shameless narcissism was expressed perfectly, some months ago, in the recruitment of fake paparazzi by some shrewd developers aiming to dazzle the indulging and unsuspecting crowds at sales parties of trendy upscale condos in downtown Miami.1 As Carl Hiaasen once remarked, ‘‘Just because a place is shallow, corrupt, and infested with phonies doesn’t mean it’s dull.’’2 But at a deeper level, one of Miami’s most intriguing qualities is, actually, that it is in some respects emblematic of America’s urban future. Cities will become more global, increasingly multicultural , and more transient; urban cultures will be more fragmented and less localized; and urban elites will be increasingly footloose. Urban economies will grow more reliant on producer services, finance, and trade while manufacturing will continue to dwindle. Air travel and technology will connect cities to the wider world, foreign connections will be more prevalent, and transnationalism will be ever more common.3 { 201 } In the past century, two other cities have marked new urban eras in the United States: Chicago in the 1930s and Los Angeles in the 1980s. Both were the subject of extensive study, large volumes of literature, and even ‘‘schools of thought.’’ Some of this, it should be noted, reflected the presence of several major universities with an array of scholars (the University of Chicago, and UCLA and USC, respectively) who ‘‘underwrote’’ their cities’ prominence . Chicago, in its heyday, was considered a trailblazer of early twentieth-century urbanization. It was a time when cities and industrialization moved in tandem. The city was all about manufacturing , expressed both in the social fabric and in a fast growing middle-class working population. Urbanization at this scale and in this manner was a new phenomenon and Chicago became a laboratory of social change, urban living, human adaptation, and urban ecology. The Chicago school produced several classics of urban literature and was central to the field of urban studies for more than half a century.4 Similarly, in the 1980s, Los Angeles emerged as another model city or ‘‘prototopos,’’5 and it is sometimes identified as the ultimate postmodern city. The LA school gathered momentum in the 1990s and it, too, produced a large and influential literature.6 Part of the Los Angeles phenomenon, one might say, was the speed of urban change in the newly arrived global information era. But it was precisely that speed of change that facilitated the unprecedented rise of Miami, not Los Angeles, as the first hemispheric city. Miami has became the most centrally connected place in the Americas, routing flows of people, capital, goods, and all things imaginable back and forth between myriad origins and destinations north and south. In South and Central America and the Caribbean, there is little doubt of Miami as the hemispheric city, an urban forerunner, the first of a kind—a city located { 202 } c h a p t e r 9 in the United States but belonging to the Americas at large. To the north, Miami’s new role is not so readily acknowledged, in part because its emergence was so recent and in part because it has always seemed such an eccentric place, with doubtful relevance to the rest of the nation. Cities can be characterized according to the historical context in which they emerged and first achieved prominence. In this sense, New York is a typical pre-industrial city, Chicago the emblematic early industrial city, Los Angeles a characteristic late industrial city, and Miami a typical post-industrial city. The accompanying transport technologies that facilitated the rise of these cities were, respectively ships, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Transport technologies are hugely important in the ‘‘natural’’ selection of sites that lead to the emergence of cities. In preindustrial times, major cities were usually located at ports or at river junctions, while industrial cities often emerged near natural resources or at important railway junctions. Miami’s significance is perhaps best understood in comparison to Los Angeles because that exposes just how novel and how different Miami is. Los Angeles...