"Playground of the USA": Miami and the Promotion of Spectacle

Bush, Gregory W.

doi:10.2307/3641982

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…But the freeze also encouraged development companies like Flagler's East Coast Railway to push further south, beyond a so-called "frost line". By 1896 the line had reached Biscayne Bay and incorporated the new city of Miami, which would become a major source of Florida promotion in later decades (Bush, 1999 (Hesseltine & Smiley, 1960, pp. 413-414).…”

Section: 1) the Exemplars Of This New 'Americanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 18761900

Lozano

2010

European Journal of American Culture

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This article examines the ways in which promoters and developers of Florida, in the decades after Reconstruction, engaged with a popular myth of the West as a means of recasting and selling their state to prospective settlers in the North and Midwest. The myth envisaged a cherished region to the west where worthy Americans could migrate and achieve social and economic independence away from the crowded confines of the East, or Europe. According to state immigration agents, land-promoters and other booster writers, Florida, although a Southern ex-Confederate state, offered precisely these western opportunities for those hard-working Northerners seeking land and an opening for agrarian prosperity. However, the myth, which posited that, in the west, an individual's labour and thrift were rewarded with social and economic improvement, meshed awkwardly with the contemporary emergence of Florida as a popular winter destination for wealthy tourists and invalids seeking leisure and healthfulness away from the North. Yet it also reflected and reinforced promotional notions of racial improvement which would occur with an influx of enterprising Anglo-Americans, who would effectively displace the state's large African American population. In Florida, the myth of the West supported the linked post-Reconstruction processes of state development and racial subjugation.

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Section: 1) the Exemplars Of This New 'Americanmentioning

confidence: 99%

Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 18761900

Lozano

2010

European Journal of American Culture

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“…South Florida's early development relied on storytelling within the press that strengthened the connection between boosteristic “business‐speak” and policy place‐making: newspapers presented Key West as being the next national cultural capital; Miami was heralded as a burgeoning first‐tier global city; the Everglades were cast as grand space for agriculture and housing, with shorelines and beaches for tourism (Croucher, ; Grunwald, ; Nijman, ). In these early days of development, local newspapers—in their news content as much as in their advertising copy—called for seemingly endless amounts of development in which newspapers (some having been created by developers themselves) used news coverage to promote tourism (Bush, ).…”

Section: Making Miami: Place‐making and The Pressmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Policy, Press, and Place: City-Making in Florida’s Miami-Dade County

Shumow

Gutsche

2016

Journal of Urban Affairs

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This article enhances the notion of city-making by explicating its communicative processes and functions within the press. Through a quantitative content analysis and qualitative textual analysis of Miami Herald news coverage related to incorporation and annexation policies and practices over a period of 3 years, we argue for a stronger implication of the press in coverage of local policyand place-making. Through a quantitative content analysis of 437 articles from the MiamiToday's place-making of-and in-Miami is as complex as the history that led to it becoming a culturally diverse and contested part of the world (Croucher, 1997;Grunwald, 2006;Nijman, 2011;Portes & Stepick, 1993). Unique among Florida's 67 counties, Miami-Dade County-which includes the City of Miami, 33 other municipalities, and densely populated unincorporated communities-has the power to make or break its cities. For 50 years, the county has applied its state-sponsored Home Rule Charter policy to grant or deny cityhood to a community wishing to incorporate and thus gain control over their local tax base. Implemented during rapid urbanization in the postwar economic boom of the late 1940s, the policy has created public concerns about inequalities across the county. Members of wealthier communities, for instance, have said that they resent what they consider the subsidizing of poorer areas in the county, peeling away to form their own governments and thereby decreasing tax revenue available to the entire county and limiting available resources to narrow geographies. Meanwhile, established cities expand their tax bases by annexing desirable adjacent land, a process often contested by residents and businesses in unincorporated areas that are then forced to pay added fees and taxes.Debate about incorporation policies in Miami-Dade County has emerged as an important topic of public dialogue amid immense development in Miami's downtown, the county's coastal communities, and the western suburbs (Bandell, 2013). Such city-making (Frug, 2001)-the policies, processes, and rhetoric applied to shape dominant public understandings of geography-intersects with press coverage of public policy in a region of 2.5 million people, as news narratives over the past 60 years have been an integral part of how those in power position themselves in the debate. Amid rapid population growth and changes in land use in Miami-Dade County, county officials began in 2011 to examine long-standing rules about incorporation and annexation; in 2012, officials created a task force charged with evaluating a number of incorporation and annexation proposals that had been brought before the County Commission in the previous year. These moments of policy-making in Miami-Dade County provide an opportunity to examine how a dominant voice of the mainstream press in Miami-the Miami Herald-communicates issues related to governance of geography. As public policy research indicates, policy-making revolves around interactions and rhetoric among key players in governance and is rooted...

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“…Greater protection for the area however also supported an expanding tourism industry that was to become a major contributor to the economy of south Florida (Mescon and Vozikis, 1985). For the past few decades, SCUBA diving trips, recreational boating, coastal leisure (a general term used here to encompass beach going, pleasure watching, birding, and near shore water sports) and 'glamour' activities to name a few have generated significant economic activity in the region (Bush, 1999).…”

Section: Locationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As development continues in the greater Miami area, altered coastlines, and dredging for pipeline and waterway construction can affect the ecology of the estuary (Bhat & Stamatiades, 2003). In addition to the above, south Florida's continued reliance on tourism as a major income generator, means that heavy boat traffic and water-based tourism will be the norm for some time to come (Bush, 1999). These activities can have negative impacts on different aspects of the ecosystem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ecology and Economics of Seagrass Community Structure

Dewsbury¹

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis dissertation document is a culmination of over a decade of intellectual discovery at Florida International University. Having received my Masters from the Department of Biological Sciences here at FIU, and then spending a subsequent year working as a technician; I view my dissertation as having built on the foundations I laid for myself in those early years. For all the trials and learning curves I have been through in order to complete this work I owe a debt of gratitude to many people. If I were to list every single individual who made a meaningful contribution to this work, this section will run multiple pages. So, to those who are not heretofore mentioned, please note that I am eternally grateful for all the contributions received including field help, manuscript comments, analysis advice, and general support over the years. typically a chief provider of some of these economic goods and services. Many previous studies have documented the ecological functions of this seagrasses. Unfortunately, our increasing knowledge of seagrass structure and function has not been fully incorporated into economic models estimating their value. In this dissertation, I focus on the seagrass ecosystem in southern Biscayne Bay, and simultaneously study the ecological dynamics of the seagrass beds, and estimate its economic value. This value is based on recent ecological models in the literature as well as data I collected from the system. I focused on Biscayne Bay due to, 1) the relevance that this question had to the relationship between Biscayne Bay and the Miami metropolis, and 2) the lack of existing reliable models that explore this relationship in this area. More specifically, I became very vi interested in this question while working for Biscayne National Park, where such a model would have improved seagrass restoration work taking place there.I found that southern Biscayne Bay is dominated by Thalassia testudinum, with other seagrasses following a spatial pattern primarily determined by salinity and water column nutrient distribution. Syringodium filiforme was mostly found east of the islands, Halodule wrightii was mostly found near the shoreline, and Halophila engelmenii was spotted at only two of the 190 sites visited. T. testudinum distribution was largely unaffected by nutrient enrichment at all sites, but it appeared to induce severe herbivory further from the coastline. For the calendar year 2004, we deduced using a Total Ecosystems Valuation (TEV) model that seagrass ecosystems potentially contributed over $198 million US dollars to the local economy. We argue that a simultaneous understanding and use of both ecological and economic models is important for future conservation efforts of seagrass ecosystems.

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"Playground of the USA": Miami and the Promotion of Spectacle

Cited by 10 publications

References 1 publication

Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 18761900

Southward expansion: The myth of the West in the promotion of Florida, 18761900

Urban Policy, Press, and Place: City-Making in Florida’s Miami-Dade County

The Ecology and Economics of Seagrass Community Structure

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