We Live Here! Florida Community Studies Consortium

Planned Communities in South Florida:
Models for a Mobile Nation?

by Gregory W. Bush, Associate Professor of History, University of Miami

Submitted to the Florida Historical Quarterly

Over the past century, community building in South Florida has taken many forms, producing brilliant new designs and concepts as well as monotonous urban blight and sterile suburban uniformity. Both the bright promises as well as the shady realities of modern community planning are inevitably political in nature. Nowhere is this also more evident than in South Florida - a region exhibiting many of the complex social needs and financial practices that drive the lucrative housing market based on that emblem of the good life, the single family home.

Real estate and construction account for more than 6 percent of local employment. Yet by the late years of the 20th century, builders of planned communities faced a decreasing supply of vacant land and increasing government incentives aimed at promoting urban density along the coastal ridge. The western part of the three South Florida counties developed only in very recent decades increasing the commute to the downtown core, producing what many labeled sprawl, while fueling new border cities. Much of the growth took place in the unincorporated western areas of the region, notably in Miami-Dade County, whose population more than doubled from 1970 to 2000. A median priced home in Miami Dade is $237,000 requiring an annual income of about $74,000 to maintain. The squeeze has been on the single-family suburban homeowner.

In recent years, a number of public officials and planners, builders, educators and business leaders have become increasingly sensitive to the need to advance a more holistic set of elements in building a successful community. Charles Cobb, former CEO of Arvida, has learned that politics and education are integral parts of building communities. “The best communities have…the best parks, the best transportation, but most importantly they have the best education…It is central to building a community.” Good schools, vibrant neighborhoods, pedestrian friendly road systems, mass transit, well maintained and accessible public spaces, natural resources, regional planning, and a commercial core that nurtures a growing and sustainable economy have all become the baseline values championed by those associated with such recent concepts as Smart Growth or New Urbanism and are reflected in much contemporary experience. Federal funds now support more flexible zoning codes to promote mixed use and enhanced public processes. Yet in most planned communities, the single-family house remains the fixed object of desire for most buyers.

Noted planner Andres Duany believes that “planning used to be superb in this country,” citing the early settlements of Annapolis, Boston, Nantucket-Marblehead, Williamsburg, Savannah and Charleston. “There are better public realms in Europe. For example, the avenues and the streets of European towns and cities are very often superior. In those cities, the apartments are pretty dreadful; it is shocking how inferior it is to even elemental American housing.”
Colonial cities were built when a walkable urban fabric, a small scale housing market, and an emergent public sphere defined much of American culture. The subsequent industrial era spawned previously unimagined forms of transportation, factories, and social distance that pushed many urbanites into newly formed “streetcar suburbs” yet failed to produce adequately planned industrial communities. By the early 20th century, engineering, architecture and planning were all becoming highly professionalized and technical, the dreams of young men that were soon reflected in popular literature, games, rising social status, and symbolized by the skyscrapers, the Brooklyn Bridge, and grand mansions.

Planned suburban communities began in the 19th century for the affluent who sought to escape the noise and congestion of the city. Carefully thought out in such places as Lewellan Park, New Jersey and by Frederick Law Olmsted in Riverside, near Chicago, the lot sizes, meandering streets and links to the city had been key elements in attracting elites who sought to escape the increasingly dirty and crowded urban scene. Later theorists such as Ebenzer Howard, Clarence Stein, and those professionals associated with the sons of Olmsted all raised questions about forms of planned communities in relation to their environmental conditions; while the New Deal helped fund several such experiments.

Yet it was in the postwar period in which standardized housing, massive interstate highwayriverside construction and a diminished public sphere came to alarm such critics as Jane Jacobs, Vincent Scully, and William S. Whyte, whose book The Exploding Metropolis (1958) raised fundamental questions about the shape of the landscape. The dream of suburban lifestyles, picture windows, and private backyards have, until recently, inordinately focused on William Levitt’s planned suburbs in Long Island during the immediate postwar period, that brought low cost suburban housing to the masses.
The recent South Florida experience blends contemporary national elements such as low interest rates, demands for security, leisure amenities and federal supports for suburban housing and highways, alongside uniquely local elements: a subtropical climate, rapidly changing demographics, proximity to Latin America, a state growth management system, as well as a growing affinity for cultural tourism. Florida has also begun to face the costs of spreading out into suburbia to fulfill the “American Dream,” in contrast to the need to preserve, wetlands and an adequate water supply and the densification of the urban core. Eastward Ho! has voiced the cry of many planners in the past decade with the Commission for a Sustainable South Florida warning in 1995 that "rapid population growth and sprawling development patterns are leading South Florida down a path toward wall-to-wall suburbanization." The American dream, focused on the detached single family dwelling, is in the process of slowly being re-conceptualized with input from a regional, state and national perspective.

This paper will briefly examine several leading exponents of planned communities in South Florida, beginning in the 1920s and culminating with a discussion of our times when the housing market has slowly shifted to reflect more recently accepted needs for better community planning. To be sure, major challenges remain to assure that coordinated planning for individual communities can be integrated within a regional and state framework. Like Phoenix, southern California’s edge cities, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, among other regions, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach Counties have been among the fastest growing regions in recent decades. All types of housing are being developed within a basic dichotomy reflecting the desire for many in the middle class to be removed from what is perceived to be the dangerous life of the inner cities while the revival of new pedestrian friendly downtowns continues.

I. Planned Communities in Modern South Florida, 1896-1960

After the failure of Spanish colonization, Miami began, ironically enough, as something of a planned American community by Richard Fitzpatrick in the 1830s based on a plantation system with platted streets and slave quarters. Yet the Seminole wars, the hostile climate and lack of connections through roads or water to the north, the area remained a backwater until the 1890s, the home of but a few dozen people. Modern urbanized Florida, spawned first on its Atlantic and Gulf coasts and later in the Orlando heartland, began with the railroad. Henry Flagler’s vision for eastern Florida was not derived from any urban planning ideal, but from a broad based economic system in which railroads and hotels, land development and agricultural produce would be woven together into a profit stream from his reported $50 million investment. Busy organizing a large scale multi-locational operation, Flagler provided certain infrastructure for Miami but remained uninterested in presenting a coherent urban vision. Miami was but one stop on the long FEC railroad line south.
Indiana native Carl Fisher had several million dollars of capital to spare when he arrived in Miami in 1910, several years before Flagler’s railroad reached Key West and Flagler himself died. Within a startlingly short time, Fisher helped finance the Collins bridge linking Miami to the largely uninhabited Ocean Beach, championed the Dixie Highway from Indianapolis to Miami, and subsequently planned, financed and promoted an exclusive winter resort - Miami Beach. Although blacks were excluded after dark, and Jews were officially shunned from many early beach hotels, Fisher’s leisure community, was a winter tourist resort, not then conceived primarily as all year round community.
The work of arguably one of the most brilliant urban planners in South Florida by the 1920s can still be seen in Coral Gables, a product of George Merrick. Merrick was brought up in Massachusetts and came to Miami in 1899. He was an aspiring writer with roots in New England. Merrick became an accomplished salesman of his new community. He was taken with the city beautiful movement and sought grand boulevards, canals, and splendid amenities to attract thousands of investors to buy land. Historian Arva Parks has noted that Merrick “envisioned Coral Gables as a spot of beauty for the middle class.” He never “would have allowed gated communities except for some of his communities that had traditional walls. He believed in a kind of democratic planning. …[That] effective planning is compounded of vision and the proper application of that vision.” The city was comprised of 10,000 acres by 1925. By the late 1930s, the WPA guide to Miami noted that “Coral Gables is not a resort, but a pre-designed community of comfortable homes set in park-like surroundings with winding drives, abundant foliage and shaded greenswards.” It remains a startling example of a city in which strict zoning codes and planning can make a positive difference in the quality of community life.
As one moved north from Coral Gables in the mid 1920s, one could be dazzled by the middle eastern designs of Curtis and Bright’s Opa Locka or charmed by Addison Mizner’s Boca Raton, a startling expression of Mediterranean revival architecture. Mizner had come to the area in 1918 for health reasons. With his brother Wilson, they formed the Mizner Development Corporation to push Boca Raton, after acquiring 17,500 acres. They developed the Cloister Inn, which opened in 1926, had 100 rooms and attracted the rich and famous of the day. Designing spectacular homes for the rich, living a life of drama, the boom which also devastated the Miami area- hurt Mizner’s grand dreams as well shortly after the opening of the Cloister.
The first comprehensive city plan in Florida was drawn up in 1923 by one of the founders of the planning profession, John Nolen. Building on Raymond Unwin’s Garden City movement in England, Nolen sought to control private development within a unified vision. He secured a contract to design St Petersburg as a resort city, but in a vastly more environmentally sensitive manner than Fisher’s vision of Miami Beach. Unfortunately, Nolen’s plan was not adopted by the city administration, yet the later development of the city was essentially built on Nolen’s plan. By the end of the 1920s, many of the grand plans for developing new communities in Florida had evaporated as the great depression enveloped the area. By the late thirties, Merrick, Fisher as well as Mizner had all largely sunk into oblivion or died. Their grand visions had been eclipsed by the changing times.
World War II and the postwar period in Florida astounded observers by its explosive urban population growth. The states urban population grew from 55% in 1940 rising to 84.3% in 1980. The spread of new technologies was central to the changes afoot. Air conditioning and television induced people to stay indoors for greater periods of time while jet air travel brought people to South Florida more rapidly and at cheaper cost. Good roads also brought people south in large numbers. Including the Florida Turnpike in the 1950s and 1960s as well as Interstate 95 and I-75, the “new auto arteries did trigger a rapid spatial reorganization of urban populations, as white residents moved to the suburbs and African Americans pushed out of redeveloped inner-city areas to newer, formerly “white “second ghetto” neighborhoods.”
By 1957, Dade County had created the first experiment in Metropolitan government, including a home rule, charter and was poised to see suburban development take off to help house the thousands of people coming to the area. Historian Dolores Hayden has written that “the postwar suburbs were constructed at great speed, but they were deliberately planned to maximize consumption of mass-produced goods and minimize the responsibility of the developers to create public space and public services.”

II. Family Run Town Planning: the Graham Family Develops Miami Lakes

Community planning had derived from a variety of prior uses of the land. In 1921, for example, the Pennsuco Sugar Company, with more than several hundred thousand acres of South Florida land, sent young Ernest Graham originally from South Dakota, to the area to oversee their investment. In 1932, he started Graham’s Dairy when he bought a huge tract of land in the northwestern part of Dade County. He then became a State Senator (1937-44) and unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate in 1944. He was also the father of three illustrious men: the future Governor and Senator Bob Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post Philip Graham, and Bill Graham, who remained more tied to the land and family business pursuits through the years. Bob Graham eventually presided over the most far reaching growth management laws in the state by the mid 1980s. Yet it was the land development business that his sons took up that he saw in his last days. And the family nature of the business was remarkable as was the novel notions of community planning that they instituted.
Master planning for Miami Lakes began in 1957. As Bill Graham relates, one of the ideas for Miami Lakes came after he had read William S. Whyte’s well known book, The Organization Man about the highly developed Park Forest, Illinois. The family’s critical concern was over-development His brother Phil then “went to the developers, who…recommended the man who had done Park Forest named Elbert Peats. The only problem with Mr. Peats was that he… was eighty some years old and really had become a recluse. Mr. Peats recommended Lester Collins, the man we got. He just happened to be the grandson of John Collins of Miami Beach. As a result, that was Phil’s real participation. found a suitable developer, Lester Collins. Bob worked in with his law education to do some zoning and planning. According to Bill Graham, “we all kind of grew into it. I was here doing the day-to-day and messing with the thing. As soon as Bob graduated law school, he came back and went to work for us. . .We all seemed to agree on it and we had the same objective and it seemed to work pretty well.”
Several other components in the creation of Miami Lakes included the fact that Bill Graham became “exposed to the J.C. Nichols Company’s developments in Kansas City which were really very similar. He had taken farmland in the 20s and developed it and everything. European travel was also integral in the planning stages. The third one was the local: one employee kept telling me that we had to develop a whole community rather than selling the thing off in pieces. I became intrigued with that idea… Somewhere, I was exposed to the concept of new towns, which became pretty popular in Europe after World War II. We started trying to visit those all around the world. We visited a lot of them. It just convinced us [to] develop a whole community rather than just selling off pieces. We wanted to have a real community, and not just single-family housing scattered all around the countryside,” Graham related.
Graham credits much of the new ideas they were developing to Lester Collins, who wanted to name the community “Xanadu.” “We wanted a name that would be easy to use in advertising. We came up with Miami Lakes because it’s symmetrical and it works well. We wanted in those days, in the words of my uncle, a real magical name. We wanted it tied to Miami, not Hialeah. We didn’t want it to be Hialeah Lakes. We wanted it set up like Miami Beach, Miami Shores, Miami Springs, and South Miami. We wanted to get the Miami name in it and that worked out.”
They began selling single-family houses, and then in ’65 got the idea of townhouses. There was much architectural deference to zoning, until “the legislature came along and changed that law that we could have a homestead exemption on townhouses even though they were common roof. Those are the kind of problems you work out as you go along.”
Lester also “introduced the idea of ‘top light parks’ to us. His concept was you have these in the neighborhoods, and then you’d have the large park for recreation for the baseball playing and the football and the soccer playing. Plus, back in those days marketing was so tough that it helped just in the additional marketing you.” He noted, “there are two kinds of spatial problems. One, you can have too little open space but, two, you can have open space in the wrong places..”
“Lester, from the very first, had a town center. That was just a given that we had. The more we looked at new towns around the world and saw places that we liked with town centers and places we didn’t like with town centers [such as one with a] big regional shopping center. We have our offices in the middle of it, and I live in it. .”
“When [Lester] came with the lake plan, we got excited about that because quite a bit of this land was ‘gonna require some fill to raise it up to flood criteria. With the Lakes, you could fill it very inexpensively. You just cast it over the dragline and level it off with a bulldozer and you had it raised to flood criteria. Within that, there were some things that we worked out.”
The Graham Companies completed a Master Plan in 1962, although the “area was not planned in detail until the 1970s.” The 3,000 acre new town called Miami Lakes started in 1962 about 15 miles northwest of downtown Miami. Miami Lakes Town Center of 90 acres was one of the earliest mixed use suburban town centers. The first phase opened in 1983. The entire acreage was zoned [for business use]. In general, the County was supportive of the overall concept and, clearly, Main Street could not have been possible with strict adherence to zoning standards.”
By the turn of the new millennium, Miami Lakes had become an incorporated city, paying a yearly mitigation fee to the county for its independent status, and possessing a population of 23,000. By 2002, the Graham companies had more than 600 employees in two states. Nine family members were involved and their operations included running the Don Shula Hotel and Golf Club, the real estate operations, several dairy farms, sugar cane, and a pecan grove in Albany Georgia.

III. Charles Cobb, Arvida, and the Emerging Corporate-Government Nexus in Shaping South Florida Communities

As the Grahams were beginning to develop Miami Lakes, the enormously wealthy head of Alcoa Aluminum neared the end of a long life with new visions for land development. Arthur Vining Davis, who had no heirs, began buying land at dirt cheap prices in 1948 and moved to a large waterfront estate in Coral Gables called Journey’s End. By 1958, he owned more than 72,250 acres in Dade County, 95% of which seemed to be undevelopable. He also owned 23,000 acres in Broward county and 5,400 acres in Palm Beach County that included the Boca Raton Hotel. He had also bought large chunks of property in the Isle of Pines and Eleuthera.
His plans were gargantuan, even for the Florida of Henry Flagler and Carl Fisher. In July 1958, he created the Arvida Corporation. Florida Trend magazine reported in 1959 that “like a giant amoeba, the Arvida Corporation has begun to spread out in various directions and to assume an identity apart from that of its creator.” Then in 1959, it announced plans for a $200 million city to be called “Boca Raton Park” on a 3,000 acre tract that would house 30,000 to 40,000 people in 10,000 homes. This was six to eight times the then population of the resort community. Questions about being annexed by the city of Boca Raton were mixed with concerns about beach access for the land locked residents, a problem solved by Arvida’s purchase of its own beach front property.
Bill Beck, “Arvida Project Astounds Boca,” Miami Herald, March 21, 1959; Bill Bien, “Arvida Corporation: Starts the Show,” Florida Trend, June 1959, p. 11]
Davis was not alone in having big dreams. In fact, by 1960, land development had become booming businesses in postwar America, notably in Florida where Arvida was joined by the General Development Corporation (controlling 186,000 acres under the Mackle Brothers) and Lefcourt Realty Corporation among others. As the Herald noted that year, men who had traded land for stock had created fortunes, including Gardner Cowles, publisher of Look Magazine and board chairman of General Development which had developed large parts of Key Biscayne.
Arvida then became a public company, with Davis owning sixty percent. Several years later, he died and his estate sold the sixty percent controlling interest in this public company to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Then in 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central Railroad merged to form the Penn-Central which two years later became the nation’s greatest bankruptcy. Charles Cobb notes that “Of course, all the management of Penn-Central was fired. This bankruptcy estate is set up to control this process, and one of the assets in this is the sixty percent ownership of controlling interest of this public company Arvida. A board of directors is found and they go on a national search that results in Cobb being elected CEO.”
In 1966, IBM bought 550 acres from Arvida for its new headquarters in Boca Raton. Three years later, Arvida built the 26 story tower of the Boca Raton Hotel and Club which was hugely successful venture. Reflecting a popular reaction against overdevelopment, the city adopted a land use plan with density ceilings on all properties. Arvida was eventually was forced to spend more than $1 million in appeals before admitting defeat on the issue.
Charles Cobb was a fourth generation Californian that came to Florida to lead its real estate ventures. Cobb graduated from Stanford, was a highly competitive track athlete, then got his MBA from Stanford Business School, Class of 1962. He possessed a talent for knowing the bottom line and building a corporate team, while giving enormous amounts of his time to local educational and political causes and other non-profit organizations. Looking back on his life, Cobb related recently that “the common dynamic is this passion of building communities, the passion of making communities better. That’s the lifelong centerpiece. That’s what I’ve done most of my professional life. To build communities, you have to be involved in politics.”
His graduate school specialty, corporate finance, was a skill noticed by the chief financial officer of Kaiser who asked me to come and help them with some mergers and acquisition work and to be the chief financial officer of this small real estate subsidiary that they were starting. Henry Kaiser, who had become famous during World War II for building ships at a rapid rate, had sought to “reconcile the world of business with the world of social responsibility,” and Cobb doubtless was influenced by him--even if they were never close.
Cobb was soon involved in building some pretty significant new towns in California and Arizona, developing the 90,000 acre Vail Ranch, now an area with more than 100,000 people. “The unique part was that it focused on that transition between suburban and rural country,” Cobb related. “So, it was many homes on five to ten acres with citrus, or five to ten acres with avocados, or five to ten acres with vineyards. We went in and planted wholesale vineyards that were commercially viable, and then we would sell tracts of five to ten acres where people would manage the vineyard for them. They could live in the middle of a beautiful vineyard, or they could live in the middle of beautiful citrus.”
Cobb tells the story that when he was first hired to head Arvida, he was handed a report on Arvida’s future track by a management consulting firm that Arvida hired. This repot was influenced by the financial track records of General Development Corporation, which was in the installment land sales business. “I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the shareholders of Arvida to be the installment land sale business,” Cobb recalled, wanting to “build real communities with real improvements and not be involved as General Development Corporation was in minimal improvements and selling speculated real estate.” The Board of Directors of Arvida concurred with Cobb’s recommendation.”The Arvida Board didn’t know the business. They were relying on this consulting firm. If you looked at past financial results, it was true that previous to 1971 Deltona, General Development and other installment land sale companies had realized good financial returns but Cobb believed it wasn’t good valued real estate for the consumer and it was not good land development practices in Florida.” Cobb developed an alternative model of planned communities after he listened to Governor Reuben Askew, who was then advocating statewide zoning laws. Most in the real estate business were opposed to such restrictions on their freedom but the notions resonated with the new transplant. “I became the only real estate CEO of a major company in the state (who, ironically, was also a Republican) to support Ruben Askew. I think I had an influence on him and suggested that it should focus on regions rather than the entire State of Florida.” Eventually, in 1972 the State passed the Environmental Land and Water Management Act that provided for areas of critical State concern (ACSC) and for special restrictions dealing with developments of regional impacts (DRIs). “We knew that it was going to cost $1 million to $3-4 million to do the planning and then go through the year process for each of these DRIs. … but Arvida was going to do it anyway. So this was an opportunity for Arvida to force the rest of the industry to meet it’s standards of quality. I was convinced it was the right thing for Florida and it was the right thing for our company.”
Government regulation of land development became more highly focused in Florida during the 1980s than in almost any other state. The state’s population had grown from 2.8 million in 1950 to more than 12.9 million in 1990. In 1985, under the leadership of Governor Bob Graham, Florida created model legislation, the Growth Management Act, that mandated all municipalities and Counties to prepare and adopt comprehensive plans that were consistent with state plans, although many have questioned the adequacy of oversight by the State’s Department of Community Affairs. Cobb also supported Governor Graham in his efforts.
In the coming years, Arvida moved in numerous directions, notably west, within Dade County as it sought to maximize the value of its land holdings. In 1972 they later built Country Walk, The Crossings and Sable Chase. Cocoplum on the water in Coral Gables was built in several phases. Arvida strategies also included market surveys that sought to determine the tastes of Latins as they began to move into suburbia. California architecture, characterized by open spaces, informal family rooms, picture windows and TV rooms, had to undergo some changes in the new market. Formal dining rooms, terrazzo floors, curved driveways, and wallpaper as opposed to plain paint were noted as special attractions celebrations.
Arvida also built Weston, in western Broward County, 25 miles from the beach at Fort Lauderdale, a place originally called Indian Trace. Close to several major interstate highways, it was also accessible to three major airports- in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. It comprised 15,000 acres, most of the original land that became known as Weston, was bought by Davis for development in the 1950s, but the master plan was not approved until 1978. Construction on the first official Weston real estate--houses in the neighborhoods of Windmill Ranch and Country Isles--was not completed until 1984. Since 1984 the community has grown from a population of just over 5,000 in 1991 to some 61,000 in 2003. Cobb recalled going to several hundred community meetings over the years in order to build some sort of consensus. With lush vegetation and ??????
In 1982, Cobb became the chief operating officer of Arvida’s parent company, Penn Central, where he was in charge of the 100 businesses and their 44,000 employees. The next year Cobb came up with a $300 million offer, largely from the Bass brothers of Texas, to buy Arvida. When he merged it with Disney in 1984, Cobb became the CEO of both Disney Development Corporation and the newly defined Arvida. Cobb lost his bid for CEO of Disney to Michael Eisner, and from 1984 to 1987, Cobb helped develop a Master Plan for development for Walt Disney World and was at the forefront of developing Euro-Disney outside of Paris. Disney later decided to sell Arvida to JMB reality of Chicago leaving Arvida executives angry and at odds with Disney leadership.
In more recent years, Cobb became an Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development, then Under Secretary for Travel and Tourism, and Ambassador to Iceland under President George H.W. Bush and has focused on a series of ski area projects in Colorado and other investments. Yet as he puts it, more than 20 percent of his resources and time over the years has been spent on trying to assist in the guidance of educational and other philanthropic enterprises. He has been a longtime leading light on the Board of Trustees of the University of Miami and was central in hiring President Donna Shalala. He has also worked closely with Barry College, started his own family foundation, become involved with the Council of 100 business leaders of Florida. His network of friends and associates, reaches from President George Bush and Governor Jeb Bush to developer Armando Codina.

IV. New Urbanism: Theory into Practice in The Work of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater Zyberk

Charles Cobb lives in a house on the water in Cocoplum designed by his son who worked for Elizabeth Plater Zyberk and Andres Duany, two of the founders of the New Urbanist movement. While Cobb and Plater-Zyberk have enormous respect for each other, they have disagreements in approaching the economic realities of planned communities in modern Florida. Cobb believes that the market requires more roads for automobility; Duany and Plater-Zuberk seek to constrain the car through planning and design.
"South Florida was a natural place for new thinking about cities to take root,” said Victor Dover, a nationally known planner from South Miami and one of their students. "There were enormous problems that came with rapid growth and sprawl, but there were also smart teachers who had figured out the solutions to these problems and were willing to explain them to a newly arrived generation of designers with urban experiences from around the world. Models from the changing face of Miami Beach to such nearby places as Charleston Place in Boca Raton helped reinforce many of the emerging set of ideas associated with New Urbanism.
Duany grew up in Cuba, Long Island and Spain. His “earliest memories are actually of land. Literally, we were at the edge of urbanism…” He has returned to Cuba and reflects that what stuns “me about Havana, each of the many Havanas…you know from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth century Havana…is that you do not have to discount for quality. It’s just simply as good as there is. Not as extensive as Rome or Paris, not as expensively built as Washington, but there is not discounting necessary.”
He attended Yale University where he met Elizabeth Plater Zyberk, a daughter of an architect who had emigrated to the US after World War II. She graduated from Princeton, worked briefly for Robert Venturi and came to Miami. The work of Duany and Plater-Zyberk reflects the thought of Jane Jacobs and the guidance of renowned Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully, among others. After first coming to Miami during the recession of 1974, he got a job teaching at the University of Miami, collaborated with others in Architectonica. Then Duany and Plater-Zyberk formed their own firm, DZP, and became increasingly interested in community planning rather than designing grand buildings, notably through the impact of the ideas of Leon Crier, who had come to Miami to speak.
Duany quickly became known as an especially tart critic of the unplanned quality of suburbanization, notably the dominance of automobiles and streets that were hostile to pedestrians. Plater-Zyberk, quieter and more involved in local community affairs, eventually became Dean of the UM’s School of Architecture in 1996, helping to make it into one of the best in the nation. Together, these two and their growing array of students, colleagues and allies in South Florida and beyond, called for new zoning codes, more consciousness of the public sphere, and a public planning process--including design workshops known as a charrettes.
The goal, in part, was to contain and redefine the gargantuan nature of the American dream associated with big houses and large lots and fast speedways into more contained neighborhoods built on a human scale. “If you go to the modern suburbs of let’s say Kendall, you get an absolutely fabulous private realm,” Duany notes. “Once you enter one of these McMansions, however dopey it looks on the outside, it’s fantastic what you get. You get a lot of square footage, you get tall ceilings, you get an absolutely marvelous kitchen, convenient parking, one bathroom for each bedroom, appliances, air conditioning everywhere. Now you step out of that in Kendall and you get a horrendous public realm…When I first showed up in Miami, by the way, Kendall was hot. Everybody was moving there…Now, with Kendall the implication is traffic, congestion, and ugliness. What happened was the feedback loop from suburbia was coming in, and instead of freedom, you got traffic congestion. Instead of nature, you got strip development.”
In the late 1970s, Duany, Plater-Zyberk joined their friend Robert Davis in driving around Florida to examine the vernacular architecture and eventually planning the town of Seaside, now considered one of the models of New Urbanism. They were consciously breaking away from earlier forms of modernist abstraction sometimes associated with the work of their friend Robert Venturi. “Seaside was actually the first substantial architecture done by architects who knew what they were doing that was not abstracted. There was zero degree of abstraction. We actually did this straight. People were and there always was the imperative to abstract, to modernize.” They created a strict zoning code, narrow streets, and a more clearly defined public sphere. As commentator Alex Marshall writes, “Instead of high-rise condos on the beach, which wall off the views like oversize linebackers at a buffet, they built homes and streets that were a short walk away. Surprisingly, rather than paying for the best view of the beach, people purchased the chance to be part of a self-constructed community. Davis, Duany, and Plater-Zyberk commodified community. In the past, rich people bought isolation; at Seaside they bought togetherness.”
Later variations of the ideas can also be seen in Disney’s town Celebration in Orlando. “Neo-traditionalism is actually a technical term that emerged out of the advanced cultural think tanks back in the middle 80s,” Duany said. “Peter Rummel, who was running Disney, was actually aware that he wanted to do something different and he knew that no conventional market study would arrive at something different. Marketing studies are always rear-view mirrors. You basically send somebody to tell you what sold last. The reason there’s over-building is that everybody gets the same advice. That’s what sells, so eventually everybody gets the same advice and everybody falls over the cliff at the same time. Rummel wanted something different, and so he actually commissioned futurists to tell him what this society would be like…we’d had a report done by [a representative of the] Stanford Research Institute…who …spoke about neo-traditionalism as the ethos of the Baby Boom generation… The Baby Boomers are not ideological. They are pragmatic and they will take whatever works best. That lecture was extremely important to my personal formation in terms of actually looking at things. It’s the old American pragmatism. It’s whatever works best in the long run.” So in one sense, the new urbanist movement has been profoundly backward looking, seeing small town community as a central element in good planning. Yet as with so many definitions in our times, old ideologies have morphed in terms of what works in building new forms of community.
Their firm, DPZ, grew in importance as they engaged in community planning efforts around the nation and the world. Along with their colleague Jeff Speck, they also published Suburban Nation, which describes and illustrates many of their ideas for a wide audience. Using charrettes to involve locals in the planning process, DPZ developed plans for Kentlands in Maryland and in offshoot New Urbanist efforts planned Mizner Park in Boca Raton and CityPlace in West Palm Beach. Although charrettes were derided at times for not being as inclusive of community opinion as was possible, they were a uniquely modern form of democracy that brought public excitement back to the planning process. Even Plater-Zyberk, though, notes the inside-the-box thinking saying, “I pointed out [to one group that they] hadn’t been given the whole program. They hadn’t been asked to either go beyond the boundaries of the park, the public land, or they hadn’t been asked to consider how that land would be best used.”
In 1992, Duany and Plater Zyberk, joined a number of other colleagues in creating the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has proven to be one of the most dynamic and influential planning movements in modern times. Duany believes that it fits into the pragmatist movement in American history. “New Urbanism is neo-traditionalist, not in the sense of being traditionalist but in the sense of actually whatever works best.” They also began to see their ideas codified, such as Miami-Dade County’s Traditional Neighborhood Development Code, which was adopted in 1991, although not often used and possessing few teeth. Their book, Suburban Nation, also became widely read introduction to the ideas of New Urbanism.

V. Conclusion:

Obfuscated by war, the tax structure, and health care reform, suburban sprawl and the development of cities remain overlooked problems in the nation’s political dialogue, part of the continuing problems wrought by the automobile as a way in life in contemporary America. Suburbanization and the mobility associated with it involves a basic conflict in the definition - and subsidization- of the American Dream. It will doubtless be addressed in the coming years as oil prices and an unstable world economy impact on long held assumptions about developmental economics. Community planning with new impetus from state and federal governments as well as the market mechanism will be forced to develop new forms of design to fit a leaner economic order.
Yet many in South Florida have tried to address the problems of community development through a mix of market driven and political incentives. The challenges of well planned suburban and center city development remain daunting. Their relationship to mass transportation, good school systems, an adaptable work base and a healthy environment is gaining more and more regional and statewide attention. The work of the Grahams, Cobb and DPZ all exhibit some of the contours of the emerging order in which marketing, new urbanism and a sensitivity to new social trends are forging novel forms of planned community. And the political struggle over land in South Florida remains hotly contentious in terms of expanding the Urban Development Boundary Line, forms of mitigation, safe drinking water, and public amenities. The centrality of land use decisions, which should be more widely appreciated even in the high school curriculum, will grow more prominent as the struggle over land continues.