Resilient Cities in a Changing World AMPS | City, University of London Page 3 ANALYZING DISCOURSES This project critically analyzed discourses related to CG in Miami, Florida. Institutional discourse consisted of resilience strategies and urban planning policy as well as transcripts of public meetings during a period of heightened climate planning and action (2016-2021). A search for the term “gentrification” in Miami City public records produced 273 results (see supplemental material). Community discourse comprised of letters to the city commission, submissions of public comment, and statements of objection related to the public meeting transcripts. In addition, I organized a community writing workshop and focus group in Little Haiti, Miami. The workshop transcript recorded the poetry shared by participants and the ensuing focus group discussion. I scrutinized these documents using critical discourse analysis. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) serves as an explanatory and normative critique.24 CDA emphasizes history, power, and ideology to consider discourse broadly defined in institutional, political, gender and media spaces, sometimes advocating for marginalized groups.25 CDA’s primary goal is to study complex social phenomena that may benefit from a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodical approach.26 CDA lends itself to the hermeneutic approach, a way of “grasping and producing meaning relations,” which I used to link the text to its wider context and consider author intentionality.27 With its emphasis on power and institutions, revealing dominant and alternative discourse, CDA aligns with the goal of diversifying participation in democratic policymaking and planning. For the case of Little Haiti, Miami, CDA provided a useful method of analysis. The Context of History and Power Immigrants to Miami faced a segregated city. At the time of Miami’s founding, real estate and railroad mogul Henry Flagler and other influential Miamians drew the city’s boundaries to segregate along racial and economic lines and defined undesirable land usage outside these borders.28 “North Miami,” the area between downtown and Lemon City, became the area where the Florida East Coast Railway workers lived, most of whom were African American.29 This was also the area where saloons and prostitution were allowed to operate until such vice businesses were pushed into a red light district within Colored Town.30 Areas north of Miami’s business district were considered less desirable for real estate development, but more suited to transportation and commercial activities such as shipping and light manufacturing, because they lay three feet higher above sea level than areas to the south.31 Like other American cities, Miami experienced redlining. Redlining, a practice established during the New Deal era by the Homeowners Loan Corporation that denied financing in non-White neighborhoods, has implications for contemporary segregation and gentrification.32 Figure 1 shows Miami’s historic redlining map. The yellow rectangle indicates current day Little Haiti superimposed within the red or “D-grade” area, far from the yellow circle, Miami’s Central Business District. Decades later, Miami reflected this legacy, being rated the nation’s most segregated city.33
