This is Day 116 of the Slow Home Project and we need you to join us in our quest to evaluate the design quality of houses in nine North American cities in nine months. This week we are beginning a month of analyzing the residential market in Miami, Florida. Regular visitors to the site will be surprised to see this special Saturday edition of Slow Home.
Regular visitors to the site will be surprised to see this special Saturday post.
We are doing it because we want you to know about a new documentary report on Florida’s suburban sprawl that was just released by Florida’s Public Television Station – WPBT-2. It is entitled, “Imagining a New Florida” and it asks the question
Has the Florida Dream Morphed Into the Florida Nightmare?
WPBT2 spent the last year criss-crossing the state talking to architects and artists, developers and historians, planners and stakeholders about the meaning of community and the negative impacts of sprawl. The show’s producer Jack Kelly is quoted on their website as saying, “A lack of vision got us to where we are today. So where we go from here lies in the hands of every Floridian”.
This struck us as a very Slow Home kind of attitude and we thought we should add our collective voice to this unfolding discussion in Miami. Although our particular focus is more about the design quality of the houses themselves rather than the communities in which they are located, both problems arise from the same issue – a fast housing industry that is more interested in profits than people.
As the start of our Miami analysis coincides with the release of this documentary we are going to change up the order of our analysis and start out by analyzing the new single family housing stock. Because almost all of these will probably be located in the suburban sprawl that the documentary is talking about there should be some good crossover between our work on the design quality of the houses and their work on the communities in which they are located.
Extended interview featuring Jaime Correa, Knight Professor in Community Building from the UM School of Architecture.
I encourage all of you to comment on the various blog posts and media stories that are being generated because of this documentary. Let’s make the voice of Slow Home heard in Miami!
