Music might be a problem in the South Beach of 2100, since it will be situated beneath about twenty feet of green Atlantic Ocean water. Happily mere inundation should not deter our hardy club people from pursuing their various 22nd-century pleasures, among them drinking hundred-dollar seaweed smoothies and dancing those crazy new underwater dances, like the Shrimp Walk and El Pulpo.
What will be the
hippest Miami-Dade neighborhood, what will it look like, and how much will it
cost to live there?
Floating biosphere communities will be
very big in South Florida, and why not? Water views, no risk of skin cancer
beneath the dome, and you can avoid the terminal highway gridlock by commuting
via Jet Ski.
Will your favorite South Florida restaurant of
today still exist? And will the clientele change?
My favorite
restaurant, Nemo, will still exist, but on a submarine, a la its namesake. Try
the conch ceviche. Joe's Stone Crab will still be there, too, serving crab claws
fashioned from soybean meal, a touching memorial to the actual crustacean, now
long extinct.
Imagine yourself sitting in a canoe on Shark River
slough. What do you see?
I see the condos of West Kendall
moving ever closer. I see the new Bush Brothers Airport. But I don't see any
birds. All birds will be declared illegal by the state legislature in the
mid-21st Century and extradited to the Bahamas.
When the urban
Miami dweller of 2100 wants to take a walk in a park, where will he or she go?
Raising children here, one quickly learns that Miami, unlike
other cities throughout the recorded history of civilization, does not consider
it necessary to provide public recreation facilities of any sort for its
citizens. So you go to the mall. On the way home from the mall, you stop at Pollo
Tropical to pick up lunch and take it, on a whim, to the park. At the park the
slide is broken, the swing set has no swings, the grass is a minefield of broken
bottles and fire ants. It turns out the drive-thru worker at Pollo Tropical has
failed to include any plastic forks or spoons, so you huddle around a warped
picnic table in the furnace-blasting sunshine, eating rice and beans with your
fingers. Future Floridians will have a hard time improving on this model for
family fun in good old Miami!
How long will it take to travel
from Miami to Havana, and how will folks make the trip? Ditto from Kendall to
downtown.
You take the hydrofoil to Havana, a lovely
three-hour ride. Kendall? No one comes or goes from Kendall since they built the
Great Wall around themselves, the ultimate evolution of postsuburban
socioeconomic segregation.
How will you spend the day on January
1, 2100?
I will spend the day dead. My grandchildren,
however, will be watching the Orange Bowl in its current incarnation; teams of
warrior cheerleaders in a WWF-style cage-match battle televised live from Disney
World. Afterward they will no doubt visit one of the many local literary salons,
formerly McDonald's restaurants, and listen to young poets expound on the glory
that was Miami at the dawn of the Third Millennium.
