Water + Salt Projecting Histories in Miami Beach

Over the past century, water has singularly dominated south Florida’s historical narrative. Yet, in the face of a rapidly changing environment, salt and the capacity for urban life to adapt to it may present the opportunistic agent of transformation to sustain the next century. In the context of rising seas, the challenge of saltwater inundation in Miami Beach presupposes a salt ethic, a salinity based re-coding of the city which continually reshapes urban life in the context of an aqueous-saline territory. Presently, the social hierarchy of Miami Beach is organized on one principle: proximity to the ocean and hence proximity to salt. Consequently, Miami Beach’s built environment has promoted the placement of structures and infrastructures at risk nearest to and in the path of the rising tide. Spatially, the culture of Miami Beach lies in the layer between the water table below and the high water mark above; the zone of inundation where water, salt, and the life of the city exist in synergy. Within this layer the forms of the city are many, acquiring their identities dependent of place. Today Miami Beach may be understood in terms of its distinct building species or typologies which have overtime colonized the city. Within each of these zones or districts, the collective building program aggregates to produce a correspondingly distinct cultural layer discernable only by patterns of access and inhabitation within the greater zone of inundation. While this mapping of space is reflective of the current organization of each district, it suggests a future inundated form of urban life, by presenting an alternative history of the city wherein urban life is co-evolved with water and salt from its founding. The future of Miami Beach is projected from a series of historical “flooded details” which uniquely render and enhance the cultural identities of the city within the zone of saltwater inundation.