Resilience - University of Miami School of Architecture

city of miami virginia key plan
While the County does not have a specific area plan for the Key, the City of
Miami recently completed a Virginia Key Master Plan. While uses of the island
have been historically mixed, the 2009 plan, wrien for the City by EDSA,
focuses exclusively on enhancing sports and recreaonal facilies. The plan
seems misguided from the outset. While the City controls only a poron of
the island, a coordinated plan should have been prepared with cooperaon
between City, County, and major instuonal stakeholders. Successful planning
for an 860 acre island cannot be conducted piecemeal.
The centerpiece of the plan is an acve playfields complex containg six soccer
fields, eight baseball diamonds, and a football field, along with running track
and tennis facilies (figure 3).
This kind of program seems ill conceived for several reasons:
• Locaon Creang a large campus for acve sports far from any populaon
center is not compable with the kind of mixed-use integrated
development called for in all the City’s planning documents. Coastal
park facilies should priorize water dependent recreaon.
• Environment Converng one of the region’s largest tracts of coastal
forest into a series of maintained sports fields is the environmental
equivalent of urbanizing this area whether or not the grass is green.
The plan goes on to state that 77% of the land in the planning zone is “unuseable”
(EDSA 6). By this they mean not available for acve public recreaonal
uses. This narrow definion of benefit reflects the self-identy of Miami as a
tourist oriented pleasure metropolis. Diversifying this self-concepon strikes
at the essence of increasing the resilience of the community as a whole.
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3. Virginia Key Master Plan, EDSA for City of Miami