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Times Square-Like Development Questioned In Miami

Posted by: Mike Lydon

29 July 2006 - 9:00am

Miami's City Commission will vote today on Citisquare, a large retail development proposed for a site next to Miami's new performing arts center. Critics deem the project's Times Square like billboards to be inappropriate for the context.

"Across from the decorous entrance to the symphony hall of the new Carnival Performing Arts Center, picture this: gigantic illuminated billboards a la Times Square, six to eight stories high, advertising fashions and products for sale inside a stack of big-box stores like Target and Best Buy.

That's what a developer is proposing to build directly across North Bayshore Drive from the arts center.

The prospect of giant commercial signs facing the Carnival center, which opens in October, is making some people queasy. Activists, city planners and at least some arts-center supporters say they're too big or too garish for the site -- and probably illegal under current zoning laws.

'To have all that big glitz in the middle of that area is totally inappropriate,' said Nancy Liebman, president of the Urban Environment League and a member of a Performing Arts Center Trust committee that examines the impact on the Carnival center of nearby development."

Full Story: Giant signs near arts center make some uneasy
Source: The Miami Herald, July 27, 2006
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All of that only scratches the surface of what's wrong with this study. The idea that complex urban development patterns and human behavior can be meaningfully studied according to one primary criteria — density — is wrong from the start.
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