The anthropomorphized manatee at the center of 

(2024)—a colored-pencil drawing from the artist Beatriz Chachamovits’s “Curandeiras” series, which renders familiar archetypes into aquatic Borgesian entities—fulfills her namesake. She has loving arms and the protective, curious gaze of a new parent; a fish peeks out from her cape, like a child hiding behind his mother’s skirt. “The Mother,” the image reads, “fosters growth and resilience of all new life, protecting our shared future with compassion and insightful guidance.” She inadvertently brings to life the story of Columbus mistaking three manatees for mermaids. In Chachamovits’s vision, a manatee-mother is certainly a curandera—a sacred healer, a living channel between this world and another.

The first time I saw the Curandeiras series at Chachamovits’s recent solo show at the Miami Design District, 

Meet me in the clearing between the waves,

 I thought of another image of healers I’d seen in 2017, when Hurricane Irma, then forecasted to impact Miami, veered west, sparing us but impacting the state’s Gulf Coast, the Caribbean, and a swath of the Southeastern US. That year, a cartoon GIF circulated on Instagram: Two white-clad santeras overlaying a map of Florida and the Caribbean—one in Miami, one near Cuba—waving away the hurricane with palm fronds, forever ping-ponging it toward each other, the storm never making landfall. At the time, before they knew Miami would ultimately dodge this major hurricane, families who could afford to evacuate headed north, many of them 

 reflecting on the impacts of Hurricane Helene with 

, Jesse M. Keenan—the Favrot II Associate Professor of Sustainable Real Estate and Urban Planning and Director of the Center on Climate Change and Urbanism at the School of Architecture at Tulane University—stated that “climate havens are a fiction of the media.” Hurricane Helene was the deadliest storm to strike the mainland U.S. in 20 years, sweeping through western North Carolina on its way up from the Florida panhandle. Weeks later, Hurricane Milton formed in the Gulf of Mexico, its power bringing John Morales, the typically cool-headed Miami meteorologist, to tears. 

, Morales shared, “It’s hard these days to be nonalarmist… this is an opportunity for us to think about talking about this climate crisis more often.”

Here in Florida, as both the hurricane and election seasons end, we are—as we’ve always been—a punchline. When the presidential election results rolled in and Miami-Dade joined the red wave, I was surprised to see comments like “That’s why South Florida keeps getting hit with hurricanes; they deserve it” across social media, along with the infamous 

. Was it truly our fault this time? We weren’t a battleground state; the final call never hinged on us. The 

 for President-elect Donald Trump, while significant, mirrored 

. And no one need wish harm upon us: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, 

emphasizes climate resilience while refusing to name climate change

 or acknowledge the need for better energy policy, while Trump long ago dismissed the climate crisis. (At the time of this writing, 

 hit the Philippines, strengthened by back-to-back storms—proving that while the Global North perpetuates and bickers about climate change, the Global South endures it, far more brutally than Florida has yet to.)

There is hope, but even then, Bugs Bunny’s dream isn’t unlikely. The waters around the peninsula continue to rise, 

 than they were less than a century ago, primarily the result of higher temperatures and worsened by Florida’s bedrock of porous limestone, oolite. Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee Tribe grandmother, educator, and activist, has announced that 

—flooding unseasonably in response to the system of pipes and gates used to suppress their natural cycle of flooding and droughts, a process Toni Morrison once described as “remembering”: “‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.” Meanwhile, billionaire-

 Michael Shvo is one of several developers funding a $2.5-billion stretch of luxury hotels on Collins Avenue between 14th and 20th Streets—an area vulnerable to sea-level rise—for a project he’s named 

 It’s scheduled for completion in 2027. How high will the water be then?

Upon completion, Billionaire’s Row will surely be utilized by visitors to Art Basel Miami Beach, itself a luxury event that, despite its undeniable benefits for the city, is partially responsible for its increasing wealth disparity. Guests of this year’s fair can expect to be greeted by the water: the 

 (CCC), an underwater camera broadcasting from a coral reef in Biscayne Bay, will be projected on the walls of the Miami International Airport, over 200 species of fish made giant. A project launched by the artist duo Coral Morphologic—comprised of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician Jared McKay—the CCC is, as they’ve described, a way to engage the public to “protect what they love” by showing them who they ought to love: the surprisingly biodiverse group of manatees, squids, sea turtles, sharks, fish, and coral that make their home underneath Miami’s mammoth skyscrapers and cruise lines. Coral Morphologic has made a career of emphasizing the resilience of the city’s corals, reminding us that limestone is made from their skeletal remains. The corals are our ancestors; soon, McKay and Foord and this writer have said before, we might become theirs. The CCC is educational, beautiful, and not obviously subversive—though everything feels a bit subversive when we’re sinking.

The artist Antonia Wright’s studio is on the Miami River—not far from Coral Morphologic’s former lab—a body of water that, she says, “might one day be higher. It’s a secret that the river knows.” She likens the river’s depths to the hidden mechanisms of women’s bodies, our cycles invisible to everyone but ourselves. “There’s the potential for birth, for miscarriage. It’s almost like the water around Miami,” she explains. “There’s the potential for sea-level rise, for change.” 

, Wright’s sound composition at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), is a discordant but eerily mellifluous chorus: birthing people at various stages of the labor process, with guttural screaming, panting, sighing, relief, and pain encompassed at once. Some of the cries sound like babies themselves. The piece is generative, programmed algorithmically, so that when a data point reaches the average one-way distance one must travel to receive legal reproductive care, you’ll hear softer, gentler sounds; when that distance increases, the voices are louder, the grunts harsher. To listen, you must sit in a room lit only by a red light, located beneath a bench. It’s so dark I lost my way, gripping the walls, tears in my eyes, till I found the exit.

Wright was horrified by the recent rejection of Amendment 4, which would’ve enshrined abortion rights in the state of Florida—a majority of 57% voted in its favor, but Florida requires 60% of votes to pass amendments; 

 has been in the works since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022. Birthing bodies and the earth’s body, Wright notes, are treated similarly by the government—without regard for their futures. “Ultimately, it’s about power,” says Wright, citing the deliberately racist history of abortion laws. “You take away people’s autonomy for the rest of their lives. It’s a type of control, like the way they try to control the water.”

Calida Rawles contends with the sea more literally in 

—also at the PAMM—an exhibition of her photorealistic paintings depicting Black residents of Miami’s Overtown neighborhood submerged in water. Some of the subjects, Rawles has said, had only recently taken swim lessons, but you wouldn’t know it. They look cradled, at home. In her paintings, water has always been both life-giving and alive itself, spiritual and full of liveness, charged by history, healing, and hallowed. It embraces those swimming in its waves, holding them like they’ve returned to the womb.

, Rawles drew parallels between her own signature practice and the histories of Overtown and the formerly segregated Virginia Key Beach. 

(2024), a three-channel video by Rawles in collaboration with Laura Brownson, accompanies the show and opens with the sound of laughter as it’s heard underwater—muffled, dreamlike. The subjects of her paintings are swimming in a pool in Overtown; there’s archival footage from Virginia Key, where Black families could freely swim and play, and of Overtown residents dancing and laughing years before the construction of the intersection between I-95, I-395, and the 836 spliced apart the neighborhood in the 1960s. Images of the demolition of homes—likely to make way for the highway—rhyme with the joyful splashing of bodies in the water: sounds of destruction disrupted by life. “This is my home,” a voice says.

In the spring of this year, Khánh Nguyên H. Vũ’s show, 

, was displayed at the Window at Walgreens, a public exhibition space belonging to Miami’s Oolite Arts. The multimedia exhibition included ceramic vessels, paintings, and two black-and-white photographs cut into circles—one of the Jordan River, made in Occupied Palestine, the other of the Atlantic Ocean, made in Miami Beach. The words “From The” and “To The” framed the photos; when Oolite Board Chair Marie Elena Angulo received a complaint about the messaging, the work was immediately removed. Vũ was asked to replace it with something new, lest the blank wall be seen as a political sentiment, too. The public backlash was swift, as the given reason for its removal was the politicization of the phrase “from the river to the sea.”. Oolite has a history of displaying political work by other artists—why not this one?

 in support of Vũ, signed by nearly 800 members of Miami’s arts community—a letter that decried the act of censorship and the institution’s refusal to display solidarity with Palestine—noticed a detail lost in the mire. It mattered that one of the depicted bodies of water was the Atlantic Ocean, an image Vũ made while looking toward the Caribbean, a region home to so many of Miamians’ ancestors. The rhythms of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic dance together. Storms circulate between us; we build neighborhoods—Little Haiti, Little Havana—in honor of each other.

The open letter affirmed that the phrase was “a reminder to viewers that water…connects us all,” from Palestine to Haiti to Vietnam, the place of Vũ’s birth. Water holds truths and memories and passes them back and forth across time and space; its different names (the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Caribbean) are ultimately arbitrary. Its strength and potential for danger are nearly superseded by its regenerative power. Perhaps if Miami floods, we will become like corals, a vision of the future as described by Coral Morphologic: worthy of love and protection, resilient and harmonious. Imagine us safe, whole, swimming in Biscayne Bay and beholden to each other.

Monica Uszerowicz

Imagine us safe, whole, swimming in Biscayne Bay and beholden to each other.

Water Story

Before Miami’s staggering skyline, the land was shaped by the Everglades—a vast, wild wetland that served as a sanctuary for Indigenous peoples and Maroon communities who sought freedom in its tangled swamps. Yet, over time, portions of this natural landscape have been drained, rerouted, and transformed into the foundation of Miami’s sprawling urban growth. The land that once nurtured life now bears the scars of urbanization. With each canal dug, with each inch of earth transformed, the city feeds off of the land’s vitality like a parasite. In the face of this transformation, two artists—Luna Palazzolo-Daboul and Lee Pivnik—have turned to Miami’s past and future to craft a different narrative. Palazzolo-Daboul, with her underground space Tunnel Projects, creates a refuge for artists amidst the gentrification of Little Havana, preserving a space where the neighborhood’s spirit can still thrive. Pivnik, through his visionary Symbiotic House and The Living Room, reimagines a future where architecture and ecology coexist in adaptive harmony. Together, their work offers a counterpoint to Miami’s rapid urbanization, grounding the city’s struggle with gentrification and climate crisis in a deeper, more resilient connection to its past for a more fluid, interconnected future.

For decades, Mediterranean duplexes of buoyant colors and horseshoe arches on Moorish apartment complexes have lined the streets of Little Havana. Flocks of roosters cross these streets in a frenzy, slipping past unforgiving cars blaring reggaeton and bachata, as local street vendors announce their wares and services in Spanish, be it nuts or 

. But, lately, these vestiges of historic Little Havana have been disappearing, replaced by prefabricated sterile white cubes masquerading as condominiums.

For Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, artist and owner of 

, the change has been obvious. In the past two years renting space in the heart of the neighborhood, Palazzolo-Daboul would chat with her elder neighbor, a tenant of one of Little Havana’s traditional homes and a fixture in the community. She had made it her unofficial job to keep the peace amongst the roosters and prevent them from fighting. She’d grab them, maintaining order in an otherwise lawless land for street roosters. But, one day, Palazzolo-Daboul noticed their cacophony had returned–the roosters were fighting again. In the next few days, the demolition trucks rolled in, the house was toppled, and her neighbor was gone.

“Who's going to keep the rooster from fighting?” said Palazzolo-Daboul. “It's the whole ecosystem that breaks when that happens. She had a role in this ecosystem, in this neighborhood, and now that's gone.”

Little Havana is just one of Miami’s many ecosystems at the intersection of gentrification and climate crisis. Despite rising sea levels and chronic flooding, new developments and housing costs continue to soar, pushing out the artists and communities who defined the city’s culture. Gentrification is not new to Miami: the city’s “urban core” neighborhoods have fought concurrent battles against rapid urban development and displacement since the late 20th century. Some, like Wynwood, have completely wiped out their historic Puerto Rican and immigrant residential and warehouse enclaves in favor of luxury high-rise apartments and designer stores. Other neighborhoods, like Little Haiti and Little Havana, have managed to stave off the entirety of cultural erasure and find themselves knee-deep in the fight. Artists like Palazzolo-Daboul are carving out a space for themselves in the ever-changing, endangered landscape.

Tunnel Projects, founded in 2022 by Palazzolo-Daboul and artist Anna Goraczko, is an artist-run gallery, studio, and project space in a Little Havana shopping center. Palazzolo-Daboul opened the space after her own studio lease expired and she needed a place to work. When Palazzolo-Daboul finally visited the building that houses Tunnel, she was drawn to its unique location: an underground parking garage that, by some Miami miracle, never floods. Around the corner from the shopping center’s main entrance, a graffiti-lined parking entrance greets guests. This is the pathway to Tunnel.

“It just happened,” Palazzolo-Daboul explains, reflecting on how, after years of working in the art world, the opportunity to create a space where both established and emerging artists could thrive presented itself almost naturally.

Here, Palazzolo-Daboul houses about ten artist studios, starting at $197 a month, including internet. The price is unheard of in a market where the median rent for a studio is $2,399 a month. Unsurprisingly, there is a waitlist (applicants were chosen based on need, career position, their engagement with Tunnel’s existing programming, and Tunnel’s ability to accommodate their practice). Tunnel also features two project spaces for exhibition. The underground space is adjacent to a row of studios, a rectangular space that is consistently reimagined for each artist’s show. Upstairs, in a passageway to the building’s sparsely used office space, is 

—a window display that artists activate on a similar schedule as Tunnel Project’s exhibition room. Opening weekends are frequently packed and a staple in the community. Palazzolo-Daboul and Tunnel’s artists ensure the space is always active—hosting back-to-back shows, performances, and workshops.

“There are not many other places in Miami like this,” said Palazzolo-Daboul. “But I like to think that the artists that show here are also an amazing representation of what Miami has to offer.”

In the two years since Tunnel opened, newly vacant storefronts tell a similar tale of displacement that the surrounding neighborhood is facing. Parallel to the urban transformation, there is existential concern about the future of art spaces like Tunnel. Palazzolo-Daboul acknowledges the uncertainty of their location, given the rapid pace of development.

“I think about it. It’s impossible not to,” they confess, grappling with the precariousness of running an art space in an environment where real estate prices are constantly rising and properties are being sold off for redevelopment.

Tunnel follows a legacy of the city's artist-run spaces such as Bakehouse Center and Oolite Arts (originally Art Center/South Florida), cultivating a space for artists, by artists. But, Palazzolo-Daboul is not married to the idea of Tunnel becoming the next Bakehouse or Oolite.

“I can't sustain it forever,” they admit, contemplating a “funeral” for the space should it come to an end. “I know that Tunnel's gonna die, and I'd rather it goes down in history as a little gem that existed rather than decay.”

Since opening, Tunnel has expanded to present a pop-up 

 in the Design District, keeping the local cultural conversation alive in a neighborhood that has already succumbed to multiple waves of gentrification. During Art Week, Tunnel presented a photography exhibit by Esdras Thelusma, curated by Reginald O’Neal—two artists who were raised in Miami, and whose works are a direct reflection of the city's urban landscapes and habitats. Thelusma, a photographer known for his compelling work in the world of hip-hop album covers, tells a story of pain, resilience, and the complex relationship between subject and photographer.

 is a testament to this deep connection between subject, moment, and visual narrative. Thelusma’s portraits feature iconic figures from the music industry, rising stars, and everyday people, like a young hip-hop artist caught in a cycle of violence and incarceration. In one especially poignant set, the artist's last moments before heading to prison are captured. These photographs, taken as part of an album shoot, are laden with emotional weight. The subject is not smiling, nor is there any attempt at the performative flair often associated with public-facing figures; what is presented is raw, unfiltered, and intensely personal.

As Palazzolo-Daboul explains, the photos are “deeply involved with the subject” and "the camera"—an interaction so intimate that it often feels as though there is no barrier between the viewer and the subject’s eyes. The show’s installation is minimalist, Pallazolo-Daboul says. The focus remains solely on the photographs. There are no painted walls, no distractions.

As we look up at the underground window, onto the busy Little Havana street, we are decidedly below sea level. But Palazzolo-Daboul reassures me, it never floods.

In the early days of the pandemic, Lee Pivnik would run along Biscayne Bay at Morningside Park, an idyllic, sprawling field in Miami’s “urban core.” One day, Pivnik opened his car door and smelled death. Scores of fish, washed up, floated on their backs.

“Some of the fish I'd never seen in the bay,” said Pivnik. “It was like a whole biodiversity survey, but of death.”

When people talk about mass extinction, it's usually an almost invisible disappearance. But, for Pivnik, the loss was right in front of him.

“It's the most horrific thing I've ever seen,” said Pivnik. “This felt like a concrete moment where you could see an ecosystem collapse, and it was collapsing from the effects of oxygen depletion and algae blooms.”

While Tunnel Projects addresses the urban and social fabric of Miami through the preservation and adaptation of physical spaces, Lee Pivnik’s 

 and various artistic projects tackle the question of ecological resilience. Since 2022, Pivnik has been developing 

, envisioning a multi-use space designed for both human and non-human species and addressing the intertwined crises of climate change and affordable housing in South Florida.

Pivnik’s project blends architecture, ecology, and community engagement to propose an adaptive solution for living in an increasingly unstable environment. The idea is to create a habitat that allows for the survival and flourishing of both the human population and the natural world, focusing on marginalized communities who are most vulnerable to both environmental and socio-economic disruptions.

Growing up in South Miami from a long line of Floridians, Pivnik was always immersed in the Everglades. For the uninitiated, the Everglades is thought of as a nuisance worth dredging—if the gators and Burmese pythons don’t get you, the mosquitos certainly will. But, for those like Pivnik, the Everglades represent the convergence of nine unique habitats, housing ghost orchids and panthers while simultaneously supplying the drinking water for 8 million Floridians. When Pivnik returned to Miami after studying in the Northeast, he determined there was no better place to conduct his art-driven research.

 stems from Pivnik’s academic and professional immersion in queer ecology. Pivnik has worked for over seven years on the 

, a project dedicated to exploring how queer identity intersects with environmental issues. Queer ecology, as Pivnik describes it, offers a framework for understanding nature as a network of interdependent, non-hierarchical relationships. This philosophy rejects the traditional, anthropocentric view of humans as separate from nature, instead promoting an understanding of humanity as an integral part of a multi-species world. Through his work, Pivnik aims to make visible these ecological and queer entanglements, asking the viewer to reconsider what it means to live symbiotically—not just with each other, but with the world around us.

Through workshops, field trips, and lectures, 

 encouraged South Floridians to participate in the design process, drawing on local knowledge and expertise. This participatory model empowers residents to create adaptive solutions for their own homes and neighborhoods. For now, 

 is paused; Pivnik is searching for more funding, and is focusing on, among other things, a new project that uses a small-scale, indoor aquaponics system to create both an art installation, and a participatory laboratory. This project, based out of his apartment and called 

, involves an aquaponics system, made of handbuilt ceramics and bamboo-like tubing, where plants and fish work symbiotically to filter water and absorb heavy metals like mercury and phosphorus that pollute the waters of the Everglades. This initiative is particularly urgent in Florida, where Indigenous communities face significant health risks due to the contamination of local fish populations.

The project’s significance lies in its invitation for audiences to reconsider their relationship to water and food production. By creating an aquaponics system in his home, Pivnik proposes a model for how urban environments can contribute to environmental repair while simultaneously growing food for the residents who maintain it. The project also operates as a critique of the current agricultural systems, particularly in Florida, which are deeply tied to industrial practices like sugarcane farming that degrade the environment. Here, Pivnik envisions a future where local communities can work together to restore the hydrology of the Everglades through cooperative farming practices, possibly integrated with renewable energy systems like solar panels, thus creating a sustainable, restorative agricultural model.

embraces the tangible, everyday aspects of environmental repair, it is also part of a larger body of work that envisions speculative futures through the lens of environmental and social collapse. In his recent exhibition 

, Pivnik imagines a future in which the effects of climate change and political instability have led to the collapse of Miami as we know it. In this sculptural work, which was on 

 during Art Week at Oolite Arts, Pivnik draws on a variety of cultural references, from speculative fiction to queer fables, to construct a world where joy, beauty, and collective resistance emerge in the face of catastrophe. As Pivnik explains, 

 is a "cli-fi" (climate fiction) story, one that imagines a Miami decimated by a Category 5 hurricane. The world of 

 is not apocalyptic, however. Instead, it offers a narrative of resilience, where mutated beings and new forms of alliance emerge in the wake of environmental collapse.

The influence of writers such as Karen Russell, author of 

, and the queer commune of Lavender Hill in Ithaca can be seen in the exhibition’s framing. Russell's story, which imagines a group of people born into a sunken Miami, offers a vision of adaptation to ecological change. In a similar vein, 

 explores the idea of collective survival amidst catastrophe, imagining alliances between queer communities and feminists as they build resistance against a militarized empire. This nod to queer futurism and eco-activism resonates deeply within the context of Florida, a state where environmental degradation, political instability, and the marginalization of Indigenous and LGBTQ+ communities intersect.

“The family stories I have are only of Miami,” he shares, underscoring the intergenerational ties that anchor his understanding of place.

Miami is a city of contrasts—its lush biodiversity is marred by environmental destruction, its cultural richness interwoven with a history of immigration, and its rapid gentrification creating a precarious future for both the land and its people. These dualities are reflected in Pivnik’s artistic practice, which embraces the fluidity of queer identity as a model for survival in a world marked by flux.

“Queerness teaches us to be mutable and to be flexible, to embrace change,” he asserts. In a city like Miami, where the effects of climate change are already visible and where rising sea levels threaten to permanently alter the landscape, this concept of mutability becomes particularly urgent.

One of Pivnik’s central ideas is that the built environment—from architecture to city planning—is often designed with an assumption of permanence, whereas the natural world is inherently in a state of flux. The structures that humans build are “rigid,” he notes, and in a world where change is constant, this rigidity is both a philosophical and ecological limitation. Thus, 

become a meditation on how we might build and live in a world that is responsive to change, embracing a new ethic of fluidity, adaptability, and interdependence.

Pivnik describes Miami’s relationship with its surrounding environment as parasitic. Miami, a city built on a floodplain, owes its existence to extensive environmental engineering, including canals and hydrological projects that have reshaped the Everglades. These interventions have allowed for human habitation, but have come at a steep cost to the natural world. The environmental damage caused by these projects is a key theme in Pivnik’s work, as he seeks to highlight the fragility of a city built at odds with its ecosystem. In this sense, Miami’s urbanization is a form of parasitism, where human life flourishes only through the exploitation and manipulation of the land.

Yet, Miami’s economic survival is deeply tied to the real estate market, and much of its infrastructure is dependent on the assumption that the city will remain habitable despite the impending threats of sea-level rise. Pivnik’s reflections on Miami’s vulnerability paint a grim picture of Florida’s financial future as the housing market collapses under the pressures of climate change and insurance uncertainty. In Pivnik’s eyes, the city’s survival is predicated on a myth of permanence that fails to account for the mutable, interconnected nature of the world.

But Pivnik still wants to stay in Miami, regardless of the environmental and political challenges.

“I want to live here for a while, maybe my whole life,” he says, recognizing that the city’s struggles present an opportunity for cultural transformation. “As much as my practice is concerned with the future, the present is incredible. We’ve created Miami to all its faults. So, even if it's all underwater one day, if this place can be better for all of the beings that call it home today, including myself and my friends, it's a joyful thing to savor while we have it.”

Alexandra Martinez

Who will keep the rooster from fighting? 

The Art of Adaptation

At Bar Kaiju, under the glow of red lights on the second floor of The Citadel food hall, I drank a carbonated mango lassi milk punch. It was dubbed the Chukwa for the giant turtle from Hindu mythology that carries the Earth on its back. All drinks here are named for the world’s monsters—Nandi Bear, Kappa, Rodan—whose stories I read while flipping through the fantastical, illustrated menu. Bar Kaiju presents a history of humanity’s fears, packaged by clever barmen as liquid courage.

Walk two minutes north of The Citadel, and you’ll reach Little River. Cross the slim waterway’s bridge, walk five minutes east, and in the center of a small park, a sand mound rises eight feet above street level. Below the surface, now covered with grass and shaded by oaks, lie remains of Tequesta people, a tribe that continuously inhabited an area from Boca Raton to the Keys for 3,000 years.

This is the whiplash of great cities, with cultures that are worlds and millennia apart sharing a few square miles. But in modern Miami, sunshine and hibiscus and mojitos tend to blur the past. Bulldozers finish the job.

“The perception of Miami is a new place, a city created from dredge filled by Henry Flagler, a city that has no roots because Indigenous people didn’t count, because there was no sense of the earlier history,” says Bob Carr, Miami-Dade County’s first archaeologist and co-founder of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy.

Little River, the flowing body of water, served as a corridor for the Tequesta between the Everglades and Biscayne Bay. In the 1920s, more than a century after the Tequesta died out, their burial mound was the first archaeological site in Miami to receive historic preservation status. “That sets the tone of Little River,” adds Carr. “There’s this promise of a lifestyle for modern Miamians that contains green space with a river and a history that shouldn’t be forgotten.”

Little River, that modern Miami community, sits north of downtown. Keep driving through Wynwood and the Design District and the heart of Little Haiti. Then, depending on who you ask, you’ll arrive. To varying degrees, you can still see all the layers of its history: farmland to commercial district to light industry to immigrant enclave to gentrifying creative center. In many cases, you eat those layers, too, to form your own muddled memory of time and place.

Squawking parrots and crowing roosters wake Ray Chasser every morning. Outside his door, he breathes in a view of four stately trees: a ponytail palm, a gumbo limbo, a Pithecellobium, and a 150-year-old tropical almond. “It’s better than almost any rainforest I’ve been in,” says Chasser, who sports a full white beard, well-worn t-shirts, and sweat-soaked bandanas. “I’m secluded from Miami.”

Chasser lives on Earth ’N Us Farms, a rambling two and a half acre parcel of land he shares with his wife and a coterie of rescue pigs, goats, sheep, tortoises, and chickens. He grows a small organic garden, which the neighborhood’s population of feral chickens love to raid. He’s a landlord too. Chasser started buying property in Little River in the 70s and owns 25 rental units, including a treehouse Airbnb, where guests sleep below mosquito netting.

Though it started as a homestead with egg and milk production, Earth ’N Us became a vegan animal sanctuary 12 years ago. Chasser hosts school field trips, drop-in peace-seeking visitors, yoga classes, and farming workshops. On Sundays, after a weekly volleyball match, people gather for a vegan potluck under a thatched roof gazebo. Stop by, if you’d like, with a pot of black beans or a beet salad.

“People have told me, this is the only real thing left in Miami,” says Chasser. “But we’re in the most gentrified neighborhood in the country. I paid $15,000 to $20,000 for a property with a house. Now, they’re selling empty lots for $350,000.”

Farmers first arrived on this patch of earth in the late 19th century, growing fruits and vegetables to send to colder climates. But few farms last in paradise.

The City of Miami annexed Little River in 1925. The South Florida town’s population had boomed some 1,600-plus-percent in a quarter century, and over the next few decades the neighborhood adopted a white, middle class, mid-century character. On a website, 

 commenters remember Bowlerama and Rosetta Theater. They ate griddle cakes at Latta’s 24-hour diner, ribs at Church BBQ, and burgers and shakes at Larry’s. The Majorette drive-thru served fried chicken baskets for $0.75. Cobbs, the Harry & David of its time, shipped out fruit candies, citrus, and orange blossom honey from its Little River outpost. In 1951 dairy magnate Neville McArthur built a green-tiled Miami Modern milk processing facility that still operates today. Check the cooler of any South Florida mini-mart, and you’ll find a bottle of McArthur Dairy milk.

I stood on the sidewalk of NW 71st Street and stared through the plexiglass at hotel pans brimming with legume (a vegetable and beef stew), macaroni and cheese, braised king mackerel, curry chicken, goat stew. The woman behind the steam table patiently scooped a little bit of this and that into a take-out container and added a heaping spoonful of pikliz, the scotch bonnet-laced cabbage relish.

Naomi’s started out as a health food truck and caterer in the 70s. But all its longtime cooks are Haitian women so, in 1998, the restaurant started feeding its community the food of home.

I brought my plate to Naomi’s backyard garden, shaded by palms and awnings and occupied by mismatched picnic tables and chairs. It was 10 degrees cooler than on the street, an oasis two blocks west of I-95. That mega highway stretches from Maine to downtown Miami and its construction amputated Little River’s left arm in the early 70s. To the south, the historically Black neighborhood of Liberty City had its heart pieced and body cleaved in two.

Shortly after, Little River’s identity began to fade. Ask almost anyone, and they’ll tell you: Naomi’s is in Little Haiti. Same for Le Jardin and its plates of crispy, succulent pork griot or Pack Supermarket, which still serves fried chicken for $1 per piece and smothered in pikliz. These restaurants were born from mass migration in the 1980s and 1990s, as Haitians fled their homes and political violence. They traveled by sea for weeks, and those who survived met a biased U.S. immigration system that often rejected their asylum claims. But Haitian American advocacy, lawsuits, and persistence earned many a home in Little Haiti.

The neighborhood radiates from the brightly painted Little Haiti Cultural Complex, where an exhibit this fall included posters with the message: LITTLE HAITI IS NOT FOR SALE. For decades, the boundaries of Little Haiti spilled like sweet Cola Couronne north and south, subsuming Little River, as well as Buena Vista and Lemon City. In 2016 the City of Miami made its boundaries—stretching all the way north to the river—official. “Now no one can come and erase the name of Little Haiti,” Marleine Bastien, executive director of nonprofit Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami, told 

While the core of Little Haiti remains intact, its edges, though official, are softening. Many Haitian families have moved to the suburbs. “By population density, there is a new Little Haiti, which is North Miami,” Jean Dondy Cidelca, a neighborhood historian and tour guide, told me. “The culture is disappearing: the businesses, the food, the sound of konpa, which is Haitian music. You see them less and less.” Deep pocketed developers press from all sides, and rising rents threaten small businesses and the working class.

I leaned back into a red leather booth at Sunny’s and sipped a martini laced with fino sherry. My table started to fill: raw scallops with aguachile negro, a dramatically stacked Caesar, corn agnolotti, a yellowtail snapper dressed with caper vinaigrette, a mid-rare hanger steak with a side of potato butter and pineapple hot sauce.

Sunny’s may well be Miami’s restaurant opening of the year. Owner Will Thompson built it from the ground up in a former roofing factory. The dining room evokes Old Florida with its Palm Beach Regency interior; outdoor tables circle a towering banyan tree. “I came here because of the bones. Even in the complete absence of infrastructure, there was this big, beautiful tree and big Miami sky,” says Thompson. “It’s also one of the few areas that doesn’t feel like it will turn into a club-staurant kind of place.”

A decade ago Ashley Abess and Matthew Vander Werff began to quietly buy up properties in Little River, block by block, until they reached 20 full acres. The couple wanted to create a walkable neighborhood that they’d want to live in. Not oversaturated Wynwood. Not tourist-centered South Beach. Their approach was more rehab than raze.

“If you create something great for locals, everyone else is going to show up,” Abess, a fourth generation Miamian, told me in her office across the street from Sunny’s. “Also, we’ve always felt that there’s a lot of amazing talent in Miami that was not as visible as it should be, so Matthew and I also viewed this project as a way to celebrate and give opportunities to local talent.”

Food, in particular, anchors their bench. A few blocks from Sunny’s guests eat intricate, Kappo-style Japanese cuisine at Michelin-starred Ogawa. The pizza dough at nearby La Natural, as the name implies, is naturally leavened. Jacqueline and Michael Pirolo, beloved for their Macchialina, will move into the neighborhood later this year with Bar Bucce. Just north of the project, there’s a critical mass of new-school, chef-driven spots: Off-Site Nano Brewery (get the housemade hot dog), United States Burger Service, The Shores Fish Market (the fried fish sandwich, I die!), and Magie wine bar to name a few.

In 2021, Abess and Vander Werff sold a majority stake in their project to Nashville-based AJ Capital. More exceptional restaurants will certainly follow. Rents will certainly rise. The character of the neighborhood will continue to morph in ways no one can fully anticipate—as clever men package history, desire, and dinner into real estate.

Villages surrounded the Tequesta burial mound on both sides of Little River, and in their middens, those ancient garbage mounds, researchers found the bones of deer, freshwater and saltwater fish, sharks, snakes, alligators, small mammals, the occasional panther and bear, and even extinct monk seals. Oysters and shellfish fragments littered the piles. The Tequesta hunted and foraged from the Everglades, the mangroves and barrier islands, and a forested coastal ridge that runs from Palm Beach to Homestead.

“It’s the perfect place to live, sort of like having UberEats,” says Bob Carr. “As they say in real estate: location, location, location. This is why development has focused so intensely here over the last century, and why Miami keeps getting redeveloped. As you know, Miami is always one high rise short.”

Caroline Hatchett

This is the whiplash of great cities, with cultures that are worlds and millennia apart sharing a few square miles. 

Lines Redrawn

Cities, as we know and love them, can range in size, structure, and culture, but in the overwhelming majority of cases, historically architects chose to build up these human habitats by bodies of water—for the easy exchange of goods and people. Urban planner Dorraine Duncan and urban designer Jhordan Channer, the founders of 

—a network of civic thinkers responding to the critical urban issues that affect island cities—now grapple with what it means to be a city. The center of their thinking is their hometown of Kingston, Jamaica, which is situated among the Caribbean Islands and is faced with mounting pressures of tourism, ecological change, and natural disaster. From our home base in New York City, we discuss with Island City Lab what makes our cities relational, how we could rethink cities in the face of the environmental crisis, and how relationship-building might be the only way out of this mess… if there is one.

 We wanted to start with your thoughts on cities as habitats. Is it correct to view them this way? We think of cities as something we created, but how much control do we really have, especially in places where climate impacts how a city lives?



 Cities are relational; they’re about people and relationships, with infrastructure mediating those interactions. Unlike car-dependent suburbs, cities are about connections across people and environments. They’re man-made, shaped by power structures. So, I think of cities as relational systems formed by power dynamics, rather than habitats.



 In the Caribbean, especially, cities are products of capital accumulation, created to extract resources for Europe. Cities like Kingston or Port Royal were strategically placed for exploitation. Through Island City Lab, we're looking at cities as relational, but also as spaces of extraction, shaped by capital.



 That’s an interesting way to frame things, but how does climate impact island cities, especially Caribbean cities, beyond obvious issues such as, say, flooding?



 Island City Lab focuses on how crises, especially climate crises, manifest through infrastructure. The Caribbean is on the front lines of climate change. Some cities, like Kingston, have entered "climate departure," signaling a shift in environmental stability. Our focus is on the relationship between climate ecology and urban retrofit. We’re learning to think of architecture not just as infrastructure, but as adaptable, people-centered systems.

We're constantly faced with hurricanes, droughts, water scarcity, earthquakes, and volcanoes, and the political opportunism that follows these disasters is often more harmful than the disasters themselves. For example, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid and Barbuda’s communal land are being broken apart for luxury real estate development. The climate emergency in the Caribbean is complex, extending beyond environmental issues to political and economic exploitation.



 After hurricanes like Irma, Maria, and Beryl, I’ve rethought the idea of permanence in cities. What does it mean to live in a city when each year we’re dodging catastrophes like hurricanes? We can strengthen foundations, but how do you deal with a category-five hurricane or volcanic eruptions? Maybe cities need to be seen as transient, cyclic systems rather than permanent, legacy ones.



 Are there examples of cities adopting this more transient approach?



 The issue is private property. Indigenous Caribbean people moved freely across the land, but land has become a commodified unit. This makes it hard to think about cities as transient, even when land is transformed by disaster. Radical rebuilding happens, but the idea of ownership locks cities into immobile frameworks.



 Speaking of set places where people live, The Cassava Piece project is focused on a specific community. Could you talk about how the project came about and what it might teach us more broadly?



 With re:arc institute’s support, we're developing a decentralized solid-waste management system in Cassava Piece, a self-built community in Kingston. Waste management is a public health emergency, and it’s especially bad in informal communities. Self-built communities often lack access to public services because of narrow roads and irregular layouts, making it hard for garbage trucks to reach them.

This issue has been longstanding, and we're trying to understand how the community developed alongside the gully, which was once marginal land for peasants. Public service delivery is difficult, and people often burn or dump waste in gullies because no services are available.



 What’s a “self-built community”?



 “Self-built community” refers to communities that were self-organized and developed without formal planning. While “informal” is often used, it’s misleading. These communities are not informal, but have been self-organized, and in many ways, they function with formal systems, even though they are not recognized officially.



 How do people in the community view land, especially regarding waste management?



 The community’s relationship with the land is fluid. They claim land, and it changes hands frequently, making infrastructure interventions tricky. We’re trying to engage in a process of continuous verification with them because the land and development are constantly evolving.



 Many communities like Cassava Piece are studied repeatedly, but not listened to. We did a community survey and found that residents have been vocal about waste disposal issues. The government has repeatedly ignored their needs, despite clear signs of poor waste management.



 How is this information communicated to the broader public?



 We’ve created a website and a WhatsApp group to share project updates with the community. We’re also conducting workshops and building a 3D model of the community, along with renderings of potential waste management solutions. This approach gives residents more accessible ways to engage with the information.



 Tourism plays a big role in Caribbean economies. How do spaces for tourists versus locals create tensions or synergies in the cities?



 The commodification of public resources is a big issue. In Jamaica, many beaches are inaccessible to locals because of hotel developments. Hotels occupy land once used for sugar production, continuing the legacy of colonial extraction. The tourism industry has taken over much of the coastline, leading to a loss of public spaces and exacerbating wealth inequality.

Tourism is extractive in many ways, with much of the money going abroad. The housing market has shifted to cater to tourists, particularly with platforms like Airbnb, leading to displacement of locals and massive suburbanization. It's a complex issue, as tourism is both a significant economic driver and a force of extraction.



I think the tourism industry is like the plantation economy Part Two. Both involve terraforming landscapes for maximum benefit—bulldozing lush forests for monocropping. A similar process has occurred in tourism, not just in the Caribbean but also in places like Miami. Many of Jamaica's iconic beaches were once wetlands—mangroves and swamps—like much of Miami. To extract wealth, environments are often flattened or destroyed. Now, we're seeing beach erosion and sea level rise in places that were once complex mangrove forests, which acted as important natural barriers. This is how extraction manifests—by taming environments.



That raises the question of whether there's an ethical way to travel, or perhaps it's best not to be a tourist at all. Are there solutions beyond, for example, restoring plant life?



I’m not sure I’m convinced tourism works for the Caribbean. I recently read a book about the first international hotel in Jamaica, built by the United Fruit Company. As they expanded their banana empire, they also bought up waterfront properties, starting the tourism industry. The book explored how foreigners consolidated land, leaving black peasants landless, dependent on selling labor in plantations, factories, or tourism. This dynamic continues today—land dispossession and economic dependence. I’m not sold on tourism, nor on fixing it. Any industry should aim to reduce dependence, but tourism, sugar, and call centers don't do that.



Tourism also commodifies our culture for a global market. For example, Carnival in Jamaica has become one of the region's most expensive parties. Last year, [hurricanes] Marion and Jose walked across collapsing infrastructure to participate. Another issue is transforming our culture into a commodity. A Ghanaian prime minister once said tourism should be a "happy accident" after we've defined ourselves. Many Caribbean countries have only recently gained independence, yet we risk falling back into dependence and commodification. This reflects broader global financial influences as well.



We’d like to discuss migration. How does migration from the Caribbean factor into your work? Do you focus more on communities on the ground?



Migration is part of every Caribbean island's story. Some islands even encouraged migration to deal with landlessness and poverty. In Puerto Rico after WWII, and in the British West Indies, people were encouraged to migrate to the UK. Almost every Caribbean person has family living elsewhere, and we have some of the highest rates of migration among educated people. Jhordan and I are part of that too. Migration is just a reality for island life—people leave seeking opportunities, and some return with wealth, which can displace and harm local communities.

As Jhordan mentioned, the housing market in Jamaica is increasingly driven by the diaspora—people in Canada, New York, or the UK. When foreign money enters a struggling economy, it can cause chaos in the housing market. Some properties in Jamaica are more expensive than those in Brooklyn or Manhattan. While the diaspora can help the island, it also contributes to economic inequality.



The diaspora is often told they can "build Jamaica" through real estate investment. They are key players in the Airbnb market and the commodification of housing. Remittances, too, are crucial to the economy, sustaining many lives locally. While family abroad offers access to education and better opportunities, the influx of foreign money is also driving up costs and making life harder in Jamaica.



It’s a lot to consider. We’re curious: do you think there is such a thing as a Caribbean city? Can Miami be considered a Caribbean city, both culturally and geographically? Is it useful to think about this, or is it somewhat ignorantly flattening?



I’m not sure. They call Miami "Kingston 21," another district in Jamaica, due to its strong Caribbean ties. People travel between Jamaica and Miami for shopping trips. It feels like a short mall visit. But I don’t know enough about Miami to classify it as a Caribbean city outside of its connection to Caribbean people. While there are shared colonial histories, the governance and history of Miami make it hard to categorize as a Caribbean city.



Many Caribbean politicians dream of their cities resembling Miami in the future—it’s an aesthetic aspiration. Miami is the closest first-world city to us, and in some ways, it feels more achievable than cities like New York or London. But like many Caribbean cities, Miami also experiences high economic inequality and depends on tourism and real estate. The systems of extraction in both places are very similar. Maybe that's why we subconsciously think, "We could be like Miami," as the same forces are at work in both Miami and cities like Kingston or San Juan.



What is the future you see for Caribbean urbanism? What does Island City Lab aim to achieve in this regard?



We haven’t realized that future yet. We’re still stuck in a neo-colonial space. When I think about a Caribbean city that can develop spaces and infrastructure independent of these forces, I’m excited, but I can’t fully imagine it yet. Still, there are people working towards it. While I’m not glorifying poverty, there are moments when communities self-organize and co-design spaces without market forces or government regulation. These spaces reflect Caribbean culture and climate. At Island City Lab, we want to democratize space-making, understanding that decisions are often made by a few people. We want to open the doors and bring more people into the process, learning together through success and failure.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Dorraine Duncan

Jhordan Channer 

On living at the forefront of climate disaster. 

Island Cities

Issue 8

It’s strange around the office this week. Recovering from Miami Art Week, wrapping the year, balancing holidays at home with apartment-bound hibernation, with the streets 

emptier, as the rest of New York does the same. After a year of convention centers and jetbridges, it’s an occasion to think about the places we inhabit.

At year-end, we’ve returned to Miami with a series of articles that explore this place and its surrounding region as an impossibly choreographed knot of biological, environmental, and designed forces that equate to something like home.

Because your approach to Miami will likely be buffered by water—the same element that threatens the city from all directions—Monica Uszerowicz 

 the local art scene through a liquid lens, “imagin[ing] us safe, whole, swimming in Biscayne Bay…”

 to one of the city’s Little River neighborhood to explore how the food scene charts both daily rhythms and the ceaseless hum of development.

Further south, Alexandra Martinez begins 

 with a drama familiar to many in Little Havana, its lineup of characters including a rooster and a wrecking ball.

 speaking with Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer of the Kingston-based Island City Lab, whose practice exploring the built environment of island nations interacts with cities across the Caribbean: places of accumulated capital, and interacting people, both separated and linked by water... 


...the elemental state that both separates us from, and links us to, The Reefline, the seven-mile sculpture park off the coast of Miami Beach that provides the cover art for this issue.


We hope this finds you well, wherever you find yourself at the end of this year, and wherever you’re headed to next.

Discovery

by affidavit

Winter 2024

Habitat 305