2016

Vizcaya Village Agriculture

[productive placemaking]

 Vizcaya Village is the newest redevelopment within Vizcaya Museum & Gardens located in Miami, Fl. The Village will be a public space celebrating urban agriculture and telling the story of Vizcaya’s early days when they subsisted from food grown both, on site and locally.

FoodScape Designs (myself and Thais Thiesen) collaborated with M. C. Harry to develop the agricultural portion of the master plan.

The master plan took advantage of all possible areas to integrate productive elements and make explicit use of these for learning and public engagement.

Sanctuary at Cutler Bay

[productive placemaking]

Sanctuary at Cutler Bay was a planned 10-unit single-family housing development located in Cutler Bay, FL.
 
The conceptual design featured an entirely edible/useful landscape and rainwater harvesting systems to accompany the ecologically-sound design of these energy-efficient homes.

Jose de Diego Middle

[productive placemaking]

Jose de Diego Middle School is located in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, FL., a derelict inner-city neighborhood that was revived through street art and suffers now from excessive gentrification.
 
The design included a food forest and two market gardens as a learning intervention and as compliment to the public art around the school campus.

Overtown Foodworks

[rethinking livelihood]

Overtown is amongst Miami’s most challenged neighborhoods: plagued with massive corruption from its political leaders and their real estate speculation and a highly-vulnerable population that doesn’t benefit from the development, saturated with joblessness, boredom, drugs-use, violence.

With Overtown Foodworks, it was obvious that the Local Integrated Food Enterprise (LIFE) economic development model should be formalized as a vital aspect of the design.

It first emerged in early designs and was realized as part of the Farm @ Verde Gardens. The model includes an ecosystem of local food enterprises: a farm, a market, a café, and a co-working space.