miami's metamorphosis
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Vol ume 10•Iss ue 1•Jan/feb 2016
REDEVELOPMENT
Revival for
London’s Paddington
HOTTOPIC
New economicera
forArgentina
INVESTMENT
Tech sa vv y Estonia
attractsinvestors
RETAIL
Boost for Bahrain
retailmarket
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Miami’s metamorphosisWith25 percent of its people now employed inthe creative economy,Art Basel
Miami is testamentto Miami’sreinvention a sa centre ofartand technology.
t the South Florida Economic Summit, organi sed
by th e Greater Miami Chamber of Comme rce in
Amid-January, urban economist Richard Florida
told more than 300 busines s people that wha t he calls
the creative economy is the destiny of the region.
The creative economy includes science and technol-
ogy, business and finance, education, medicine, media,
entertainment, culture, and the arts. In Miami and the
rest of Sou th Florida he finds tha t up to 25 percent of the
working population is involved in the creative economy.
In San Francisco the number is 40 percent, so Miami has
a way to go.
The Tr o u b l e wiTh MiaMi Glamorous and fashionable in the 1920s and 1930s, Miami
went downhill in the 194 0s when hotels were turned into
military bases and the econom y turned to preparation for
war. By the 1950s the area was poor, shelter to retirees
from the North who stayed in rundown hotels and roominghouses. Then came dru gs and drug lords and crime as well
as racial upheavals in the 1960 s and 1970s.
The television series Miami Vice with an attractive pair
of black and white detectives who wore designer clo thes,
drove luxury cars, and raced around Biscayne Bay in
speedboats - entertaining beautiful women or chasing
criminals - had a lot to do with upgrading the image of
Miami. The show ran from 1984-90 and can still be found
on some local and cable channels.
Simultaneously, ageing hotels on Miami Beach were be -
ing revitalised, their Art Deco facades restored, and so mehardy developers were putting up major residential com-
plexes, for example, Grove Isle.
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But that wasn’t enough for economic success and, in-
deed, the worst point came in 1992 when Hurricane
Andrew devastated Miami and South Florida. With thehelp of federal funds, insurance money, and team spirit,
the community pulled together and
began the renaissance that led to the
reinvention of Miami as a centre of art
and technology.
Suzanne Delehanty was recruited to come to Miami in 1995
“with the charge of transforming what was then called the
Centre of the Fine Arts (CFA) into greater Miami’s flagshipart museum.” She found, “both the leaders of Miami-Dade
County government and key civic leaders were committed
to developing greater Miami’s potential as a global centre in
the 21st century. That meant the creation of a major art
museum.” Over 11 years, Delehanty says, “we carried outcommunity-wide planning and transformed the Centre for
the Fine Arts, a non-collecting depart-
ment of our county government, in the
Miami Art Museum (MAM), a freest and-
ing collecting museum with a strong
commitment to education,” making her
the Founding Director of MAM.
At the same time, Delehanty was
involved in the groundwork for building the museum’s new
home. “We collaborated with the science museum and c om-
munity members in the transformation of 30 acres of dere-lict waterfront land in downtown Miami into a Museum Park,”
she explained, “and secured USD 100 million in Miami-Dade
The art scene and thereal estate scene arereally one and the same.
One ThousandMuseum
CreaTing a Majo r
a rT MuseuM
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ABM B, Image co ur tesy
of ArtBasel
County bond funding” for the new museum to be designedby Herzog & de Meuron. Thanks to a gift from developer and
art collector Jorge M. Perez, the renamed Perez Art Museum
Miami (PAMM) opened in late 2013.
However, it took several more years for Art Basel to arrive.Thef irst ABMBwassc hedul edin December 2001. However, in
the year of 9/11 an unexpected result was that international
insurers who guarantee shipping of art works were unwill-
ing to do it. ABMB opene d in 20 02 and c losed its 14th edition
in December 2015.
That event included 267 galleries from 32 countries
representing five continents. More than 77,000 peo - ple
went through the galleries including Hollywood stars and
eminences of the art world - artists, cura- tors, and
collectors. Some of them are already booking their rooms
for the 2016 edition as always in early December.Perhaps William Talbert III, President & CEO, Great Miami
Convention and Visitors Bureau, put it best: “Before Basel,
the words ‘billionaire,’ ‘Miami,’ and ‘Miami Beach’ were not
[commonly] used in a sentence.” Talbert who heads the
a r T ba s e l CoM es To MiaMi
Delehanty witnessed the beginnings of what became Art
Basel Miami Beach (ABMB) in 1996. She found it “exhila-
rating to be part of the whirlwind visits” of representatives
of Art Basel in Switzerland who “sensed the ‘political will’
desiring Miami to become the hub for the Americas in the
21stcentury.”
Art Basel was interested in expanding beyond one fair in
June. They encountered Miami’s diversity - “then and now
its greatest strength” – and “found a vibrant community of
artist s and art collectors as well as mus eums and other cul -
tural institutions, which had developed over the decades.”
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No other event in SouthFlorida compares whenit comes to drawing highnet worth individuals.
area’s efforts to bring in visitors notes that hotel oc-cupancy is highest during ABMB, second only to New Year’s
Eve. Miami’s Art Week, starring ABMB, Art Miami and a host
of satellite fairs in Miami Bea ch
and the mainland, has become a glob-
al destination, according to Patrick
O’Connell, Senior VP Business Devel-
opment, at EWM Realty International.
“No other event in South Florida com-
pares when it comes to drawing high-
net worth individuals.”
br ing ing in TeC hnol ogy
Seemingly separate from the art world is the technology
ecosystem developing in Miami and greater South Florida.
One of the major drivers is eMerge Americas, a conference,
exposition, and fair at the Miami Beach Convention Cen-
tre like ABMB. It’s the brainchild of Manny Medina, a devel-oper turned technology executive who sold his company
Terremark to Verizon telecommunications in 2011 for USD 1.4
billion. Medina used some of the mon-
ey to start eMerge in 2014. It has grown
exponentially with its third edition
set for April. Thanks to the boost of
eMerge, funding from the Knight Fou n-
dation, accelerator organisations like
Endeavor, and local universities, Miami
is becoming a centre of high technology
development. Some new sta rt-u ps are linked to the arts. Butoverall, high tech is part of the creative economy, and that
is something made increasingly possible by the surge that
ABMB provided.
T he a r T b a s e l h a l o e f f e C T
Faith Hope Consolo lives in New York City and is recog-
nised worldwide as the “queen of retail” who heads the
Retail Group at Douglas Elliman. Sh e ’ s been to a number
of ABMBs because “everyone convenes from all corners
of the world.” At ABMB she finds a “cultural scene similar
to the Cannes Film Festival combined with Fashion Week
New York, Europe and beyond.”
As a retail expert, she knew ABMB would draw “new
restaurants, shops” and “even the ambience took a mod-
ern and contemporary spin.” In the end, Consolo believes
“the art scene and the real estate scene are really one
and the same. Major collectors come from the owners/
developers side and have made art part of selling their
buildings, decorating their homes, providing wings to
museums.”
Buyer s of luxur y condominiums in shiny towers are often
surrounded by art, “branding elements for the projects,”
according to a long-time Miami resident and real estate
expert. “Multimillion-dollar sculptures by art world stars
Fernando Botero (Colombia), Jeff Koons (USA), and Jaume
Plensa (Spain) are now part of the Miami landscape, sited
by developers w here the public can see them.”
In a recent editorial, the Miami Herald quot - ed Harve
Mogul, CEO of United Way in Miami-Dade: “Art Basel has
spawned hundred of succes s- ful anci l lary businesses
and fuelled the growth of Wynwood, the Design District,
and Midtown, not just Miami Beach. And, equal lyimportant, it has helped elevate our community’s self-
est eem and aspiration for an even better tomorrow.”