ABSTRACT
With three million people per day entering and leaving its airport, Miami is truly a world city and a critical site for the production and circulation of information, services, and capital. The city holds the strongest connections with Latin American and Caribbean nations, as reflected in the diversity of its communities, culture, commerce, and politics. In this reading, LiPuma and Koelble consider Miami the exemplar global city for the circulation of goods, people, services, and capital. They ask how is it that, despite the transitory nature of flows and circulation, Miami has internalized its overlapping and sometimes conflicting ties with other cultures and maintains a recognized and even stable place identity. Their answer relies on their use of the concept of the urban imaginary. An urban imaginary is a narrative of a city’s past, present, and future that neatly presents a coherent, stable, and idealized identity of place. In order to do so, the urban imaginary must artfully represent certain aspects of city life while concealing others. In the case of Miami, its urban imaginary makes intelligible the flows, migrations, and movements that have come to define its everyday reality. The imaginary Miami seeks to normalize the often chaotic nature of the city’s vast diversity and represent a stable, ideal sense of identity that is, in fact, reflective of certain interests while excluding others.
