“The city without cars”
Located on the northern coast of Miami, Bal Laguna exists as an idea. An idea that focuses on your place. How you live. How you work. How you circulate through a city. Embracing the Atlantic Ocean, this project integrates life, nature, and community.
Miami as we know it will cease to exist in the coming decades. Developers take measures to keep the rising sea level at bay. Mass flood walls. City-wide dikes. Even raising the “ground level”. But these precautions are just that, “Precautions”. Foreshadowing devastation.
Environmental rehabilitation and urban design are an unlikely pair. How can an ecosystem be returned to its natural state while being developed into an urban environment? The marriage of nature and architecture is widely practiced, but these “futuristic” case studies look ambiguous in what environment they are trying to protect. They are first attempts. Vital. Teachable. But they are not enough.
Approaching this issue requires a fundamental shift in the way we design cities. Miami was never supposed to exist. The southern Floridian panhandle used to be home to the Everglades. Now tired of perpetual mutilation, the land is beginning to fight back. Resisting nature is futile. We must design with the landscape. We must restore the Everglades one neighborhood at a time. Hence, we propose vernacular urban design.
Bal Laguna is divided into four districts, each centered around a nature reserve. This development reimagines what it means to live in a city built on the Everglades. Intimately intertwined with nature, the lines between commercial, residential, and landscape are blurred. Access to public transportation is at the forefront of each district.
With prohibition on private motorized transportation, the districts are designed with pedestrian paths, access to a centralized rail network, and a public boat service. Access to Bal Laguna from greater Miami is restricted to the main transit hub. Transportation through a development is the duty of urban planning. This hub is the heart of Bal Laguna, with canals and paths circulating the lifeblood of the city.
Nature lives seamlessly. So must our cities follow that example. In an ambitious feat of urbanization in the name of environmental rehabilitation, Bal Laguna, formerly known as Bal Harbour, becomes the Everglades once again. The definition between hardscape and landscape becomes indistinguishable. Buildings are not designed from lots but rise with the environment in which they live. Out of intentionality and respect, Bal Laguna embraces the sea, as the Everglades have for millennia.
I don’t want self-driving cars. I want boring things like public transit. Transportation that comes so regularly I don’t need to check a schedule. I want to live with nature, spend my life in buildings that remind us of our place in this world. I want to walk in cities that pay respect to the local environment with an almost palpable reverence. I want cities that aren’t built around car-as-default.
I want a city like Bal Laguna.
Music: “Envisage” by Keith Merrill
https://www.youtube.com/c/keithmerrillmusic
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