Berkeley Planning Journal

Miami Modern Metropolis—MMM—takes the reader to the moment in Miami’s urban history when the city became modern. To support this claim this handsome volume, edited by University of Miami professor Allan Shulman, offers an unprecedented catalogue of images, cases and archival evidences that will certainly make this publication a platform for the future scholarship of architecture, urban design and planning in that chimeric place known as Miami.

Indeed, when imagining Miami, the glitzy façades of South Beach Art Deco buildings come to mind. Perhaps, vague memories of the 1980’s conjure up a blurred collage: Miami Vice collides with Scarface to render a tele-genic city with splashes of cool pastel visuals set against xenophobic epitaphs. From this decade’s portrayal of danger, tumult and excess, Miamians crafted an urban imaginary of sensual glamour and multicultural difference. Today, a distinctive urban brand mixing tourist leisure and carnal abandonment sell city’s image as a site of global consumption, investment and paradisiacal living.