Water. It covers most of the earth’s surface and attracts many people to live or vacation near it. In fact, up to 40 percent of the global population lives within 60 miles of a coastline, according to the United Nations.
Yet coastlines also present challenges for municipalities around the world as sea levels rise and storms threaten to harm coastal infrastructure. Last week, leaders from the University of Miami School of Architecture, along with experts focused on South Florida, joined leaders from Denmark to discuss how to design, plan and build sustainable and desirable communities along the coast.
“As a school, we are deeply committed to the questions of resilience, climate adaptation and the future of coastal cities,” said Rodolphe El-Khoury, dean of the School of Architecture. “Miami provides different challenges, but there is much we can learn from Denmark’s internationally-recognized sustainable urbanism.”
Danish Ambassador Jesper Møller Sørensen visited the Stanley and Jewell Glasgow Lecture Hall on the Coral Gables Campus Friday to participate in the panel discussion titled, “Designing Resilient Waterfront Cities,” moderated by professor Jose A. Gelabert-Navia, an experienced architect and former dean. Also on the dais were alumna Deborah Tackett, planning director for the City of Miami Beach; Jakob Norman-Hansen, director of BLOXHUB, an organization working for sustainable urbanization based in Copenhagen; and Juan Mullerat, an architect, urban planner and alumnus who founded Plusurbia, a design firm based in Miami.
“Florida is an incredibly important state with Miami as the epicenter … often looking outwards to Latin America and also over the Atlantic Ocean, and in that sense, I think there are many similarities with Denmark because we have always been forced to look outside of our own borders,” Møller Sørensen said, noting that his country is nearly 6 million citizens. “But of course what we don’t have is the scale that you have, and I think that that creates a platform for a strong partnership, so I have a lot of goals and aspirations for us to work together.”
The discussion then moved on to a major revitalization project in Copenhagen, Denmark’s largest city, where BLOXHUB has helped create collaborations to clean up the waterfront and attract more residents, as well as visitors. They moved the port and cleaned the contaminated water so that today, people can easily access the waterfront.
“I grew up in Copenhagen, and 34 years ago, it didn’t look at all like what it does today. It was almost bankrupt, it was very polluted, and it was not very livable,” said Norman-Hansen, noting that Danish architect Jan Gehl’s idea of designing cities for people inspired a lot of the modern restoration efforts in the city and its harbor.
“In the summertime now, you will see people flocking to the waterfront, swimming and kayaking because the harbor has been cleaned up and people enjoy being close to the water,” he added. “It’s part of the identity of Copenhagen now.”
Mullerat then talked about a few waterfront projects he is working on for local governments in South Florida. One involves raising the road and revitalizing Virginia Key to create more recreational space for local residents to enjoy the beach there. Another is a plan to work on Watson Island, along the causeway to Miami Beach, and retrofit it to become a more resilient part of Miami-Dade County.
“We have a real love affair with the water, but we also have a lot of challenges because of it. We build right on the coast, so those vulnerable places are encroached,” he said. “We need to be able to adapt and to understand how things are going to change in the future, so we are looking at how potentially we can actually adapt areas of our community and improve them again, so that they last much longer than just the next few years.”
Tackett then spoke about multiple projects in Miami Beach, where she has played a role in helping the city raise its roads up to four feet on the west side to prevent flooding, while also creating a pedestrian path along the ocean. In addition, Tackett mentioned artificial coral reef projects being piloted to help prevent storm surge. She is also working on plans to relieve the transportation hurdles of workers who must commute to and from the barrier island.
“There’s this whole idea of a multipronged approach to resiliency as a lesson learned from Miami Beach,” she said. “It can’t just be one solution. It has to have a very multidisciplinary approach to be successful.”
