Design Studio Options – LAN3016

With nearly 20 million residents, Florida is one of North America’s fastest growing regions. Its extensive suburban landscape is enabled by the continued manipulation of a dynamic estuarine environment and a pervasive real-estate-driven housing pattern. The overall structure that defines Florida’s metropolitan areas results from the combination of hard infrastructural lines, developer-driven master plans, reductive normative zoning, and prescriptive form-based codes. These conventional tools have proven marginally effective in dealing with the increased flooding vulnerability on the Floridian urban fabric; rendering traditional static “object-based codification,” which has defined much of contemporary urban design, inadequate and in urgent need of innovation. To that end, this studio examined the potentials of landscape architecture to reshape zoning codes through the lens of flux.  Stduents had the option of visiting sites in South Florida and meeting with officials in Broward County and Miami.