Another Miami

March 12, 2023

As Miami’s legendary spring break approaches, we present two inspiring public participation initiatives in Magic City. We tend to forget: Miami is not just about tourism, beaches and parties. There are also thousands of ordinary people living in working-class neighborhoods. Two public participation (P2) initiatives particularly impressed us: Little Havana and Wynwood Norte.

Art deco-inspired social housing complex in the Little Havana district of Miami.

Little Havana

Juan Mullerat is the founding principal of Plusurbia Design. He gave us a tour of Little Havana and told us about the ultra-innovative approach that his firm put forward to mobilize the local population of “Little Havana”, a neighborhood where he actually lives. All in all, nearly 2,000 people got involved in the various stages of this vast public participation (P2) program with the aim of redefining their residential neighborhood. An initiative that Juan and his firm will have piloted for nearly four years in collaboration with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Their joint 170-page report, Little Havana Me Importa (I care about Little Havana) was released in June 2019 and the proposed changes have started to slowly get implemented.

The Little Havana Revitalization Plan is described as a roadmap for the future health and vitality of the neighborhood, developed in collaboration with residents and stakeholders.

At the unveiling of the report, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez had this to say about the project: “I am beyond blown away. There has never been a more comprehensive study done in any neighborhood in the city of Miami and to me, that master plan is not just a document; we need all of you to make this a reality”.

CONTINENTAL CROSSROADS

Miami’s population was 439,890 people in 2021 and 6.1 million people including Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, which places the urban area eighth in the United States. Interesting fact: 72.5% of Miamians say they are of Hispanic or Latin American origin.

Wynwood Norte

Following the Little Havana project, Plusurbia undertook another requalification process not far from there, in the Wynwood Norte district. This time the mandate came directly from a real estate developer that was really visionary to say the least. He was convinced that the Little Havana approach was the right way to go.

With other specialists and consultants, Plusurbia was given the task  to revitalize the area and to mobilize this typically Puerto Rican neighborhood, in which the developer held interests. Juan Mullerat told us that the very first stage of the project, surprisingly enough, was very simple: they started by creating an association of residents and stakeholders. There was none before Juan and his team decided to bring together key players.

The public participation program then mobilized the members of this new association and the population of Puerto Rican origin. Starting from there, it was possible to record their “ideas-needs-desires-vision” and develop a common vision for the sector.

It must be said that the City of Miami believed in the project and embarked on the adventure just as much as the citizens. Wynwood Norte’s first Master Plan was therefore officially adopted by City Council last fall.

During our interview in Miami, Juan Mullerat talked about the spark that is needed for these kinds of initiatives and talked a lot about the charrette procedure for conducting brainstorming workshops with large groups of people, an approach that COLŌKIA also likes to use a lot (our record: a charrette of more than 150 people in Québec City).

The charrette procedure

One could say that the Charette procedure is a way to instill “fair and equitable creativity” by allowing large groups of participants to brainstorm on several topics at once. The technique involves randomly dividing participants into smaller groups, with each person speaking in turn, until everyone at the table has had a chance to fully contribute.
The concept was invented by architecture students in the early 19th century. They literally used carts to propel their sketches across the room to get final approvals. Similarly, in a charrette, the ideas generated by one table are transferred to the next group, to be developed and/or refined and ultimately prioritized.

Property developers or city builders?

During our interview, Juan Mullerat was amused by the expression “real estate promoter” (promoteurs immobiliers) that we use in Quebec. In fact, it was the term promoter that made him smile because he feels that developers, in English -or promoters- are in fact “city builders” to use his own words and that we owe them a lot, even if we like to accuse them of all the evils related to the housing crisis. In fact, the real problem, according to him, is “unmanaged change”, i.e. when the culture of a neighborhood and the contribution of its residents are not taken into account at all and when development is done in an uncoordinated manner.

He also spoke of the essential role of cities in the public participation process – in complete equality and not as leaders – and of the great need for public participation professionals to dream big and have ambition for the communities they serve and represent.

Three lessons from Barcelona

July 07, 2022

In port cities with a heavy industrial past, such as Montreal or Barcelona, the transition to the new economy at the turn of the millennium precipitated a host of factories, warehouses and spaces into total disuse and it became necessary to give a new vocation to these places, which were often close to the port. The technical term used for this in urban planning is requalification.

Barcelona tackled the problem brilliantly in the Poblenou district, where such a transformation has been taking place for twenty years. A transformation so skillfully orchestrated that it has become an urban laboratory grasping attention from all around Europe. Here are some lessons from the 22@ project.

Lesson #1 : take your time

What is going on in Poblenou could be transposed in whole or in part to the former refineries in Montreal East or to the future redevelopment of the former Blue Bonnets site west of Décarie. And some of the ideas being developed here could possibly have greatly improved the development of Griffintown if we had just taken a little bit more time. As urban strategist François Duchastel, partner at Voodoo Associates, explains in the interview he gave us in Barcelona in July 2022, the Adjunament de Barcelona was not afraid to consult with communities and experiment from the get go in 2001. It didn’t all happen all at once.

Our film set in the Poblenou neighborhood on Calle de la Ciutat de Granada.

 Barcelona’s city grid has more than 550 blocks of 113 square meters as designed by civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà in 1856.

Superilla = super block

One of the great innovations of the 22@ experience is that a few “super blocks” – the superillas – were created to form groups of three blocks by three blocks considered as entities in their own right, sort of safe and peaceful enclaves in he city.

Lesson #2: don’t focus so much on the automobile

What is particularly interesting about the 22@ project in Poblenou is that the City of Barcelona was strongly inspired by it and extended it to several other districts of the Catalan metropolis. Like the superillas deployed in Poblenou, Sant Antoni and Hostafranc, Barcelona now wants to free up spaces for citizens and pedestrians across the city. Other large areas will be developed by the end of 2023. This is a clear attempt to promote social interaction nd environmental protection and reduce the importance traditionnally given to motor vehicles. Especially when it comes to traffic inside the superillas. In the new plans, we are switching from all-out motorized traffic to shared mode and by limiting car access almost exclusively to residents, at very low speed, inside the superillas.

BEFORE

SUPERILLA

Credit: City of Barcelona

Lesson #3 : consult and mobilize communities

From a public participation point of view, Barcelona’s know-how is recognized worldwide. In the opinion of urban strategist François Duchastel, the contribution of communities is indeed crucial to the productive development of requalification projects.

“I think we must find strategies for people to participate in a concrete way without just being in opposition, but to really participate. And that’s where co-design projects, co-participation, on specific elements where people can really have an impact on their living environment, and then be able to say, yes, we influenced that. Barcelona did it, among other things, by district of the city. They identified about twenty projects, allocated budgets and then opened on a digital platform, which people can vote to decide. Is it a priority here to make land that would become a planted park? Or do we prefer to make a space elsewhere that would be a space for children’s play? Or are we going to remove a traffic lane instead? People were able to speak out. Here it would cost 600,000 euros, here it would cost 1.2 million, then decide how to allocate the budget. »

The founding father of modern-day urban planning

Urban planning was invented in Barcelona. Literally. Its creator is civil engineer Ildelfons Cerdà, who was entrusted with the planning of the Exaimple, the extension of Barcelona outside the fortified walls starting in 1859. We therefore owe him the first urban development plan, the Cerdà Plan. It is this checkerboard-shape urban grid so characteristic of Barcelona, which is unique in that the angles of its blocks are cut at 45 degrees to allow for better visibility at intersections. He also wrote Teoría general de la urbanización which is still taught in major schools.