Miami Beach forever? Urbanism in the back loop

Abstract

In the Anthropocene, coastal cities are increasingly cast as climate change first responders: both “front lines” where uncertain futures are unfolding and “laboratories” in which experimental resilience infrastructures are being tested out. Engaged with anticipatory risk governance and urban climate experimentation literatures, this article critically examines recent resiliency infrastructure experiments in Miami Beach, Florida, a key climate change site known as ground zero for sea level rise in the United States. Using critical analysis of media and policy documents, site observation, and political and ecological theory, this article explores resilience experimentation in Miami Beach as a matter of transforming modes of anticipatory risk governance in the Anthropocene “back loop.” Beyond mere technical innovations, what visions of urban life and futures are forwarded in these experiments, and how are they transforming the nature of urbanism? Rather than courageous, utopian attempts to positively transform the city, the paper argues, these projects seek to lock Miami Beach and its residents into a single, unitary vision of the future, one of high-end real estate and luxury lifestyles buttressed by an invisible background of service and other wage work. The paper further argues however that this dream of Miami Beach's static future may be undone by the city's own experimental efforts to secure it. To conclude the paper argues that Miami Beach's resilience experiments represent an emergent paradigm of “back loop urbanism,” a form of urban governance devised amidst dislocation, made up of distinct experiments that fold in local trajectories in unique and sometimes conflicting ways.