ABSTRACT
Miami is a provocative case of urban development and race relations. Urban boosters have historically projected an image of a “magic city” and an “American Riviera” by the sea, a resort paradise of tourism and architectural spectacle. The fanciful Spanish Mediterranean mansions and hotels of the 1920s, such as the landmark Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel, have given way to a twenty-first-century Gold Coast of spectacular high-rise condominium and hotel towers along the shoreline of Biscayne Bay. Beachside promotional images of a “city at play” have whitewashed a starker real history of Jim Crow segregation and postwar racial removal that bred disinvestment and the creation of extensive black “ghetto” neighborhoods such as Overtown and Liberty City, which erupted with incendiary violence in the 1960s and 1980s. The black community was hit hard in the postwar fordist period of Miami’s development, when the construction of Interstate 95 and associated urban expressways devastated the commercial and residential heart of Overtown, the city’s original black neighborhood. The urban expressways further contributed to the decline of the inner city with the outmovement of people to newer subdivisions in the suburban periphery. This period of “black removal” under fordism has been followed by a period of “black renewal” under postfordism as preservationists and place
entrepreneurs work to revitalize the ghetto and reclaim the historic community through the development of an Overtown “Folklife Village” that joins heritage and cultural tourism with strategies of local economic development. Progress has been gradual for three decades, with many lots still vacant, but Overtown is now poised for change as the rise of Miami as a global trade entrepôt and the “gateway to Latin America” has stimulated the revival of downtown and corporate investment in urban ethnic niche markets and neighborhoods.
