For the second year in a row, thousands of art and design aficionados flocked to Miami the first weekend in December for Art Basel Miami Beach?the tropical American sister to the longstanding Art Basel show in Switzerland.

Sacred Sister / Bettina WitteVeen
German photographer Bettina WitteVeen has spent most of the past decade trying to photograph the true face of the world\'s women. The emotions evoked by WitteVeen\'s deeply spiritual pictures have been intensified by her collaboration with Robert Wilson, the designer and theater director of Einstein on the Beach. In Miami, the exhibition took the form of an unexpected tactile and fragrant treat?a thick layer of autumn leaves covered the floor of the studio at the Art Deco-style Buena Vista Building.
www.bettinawitteveen.com

GOAT / Benedikt Taschen,
publisher \"Extravagant\" is the only word that comes to mind for this tribute to the Greatest Of All Time (GOAT)?boxer Muhammad AN. Weighing in at 75 pounds and 792 pages, measuring 20 inches by 20 inches, editions of GOATsell for $3,000 to $7,500. Benedikt Taschen, the publisher from Cologne, Germany, gained notoriety in 2000 for SUMO, a tome of Helmut Newton photographs that came with its own table. The \"Champ\'s Edition\" of GOAT is nearly enough to decorate an entire room: Not only is the imposing work signed by AM, but it comes with a sculptural stand, designed by American artist Jeff Koons (who also signed each book), featuring an inflatable dolphin soaring over the book. Though Muhammad AM is beset by Parkinson\'s disease, he still cut an impressive figure at the book\'s unveiling in South Beach (at the Miami Beach Convention Center, where he won his first heavyweight title victory against Sonny Liston), surrounded by an adoring crowd that included Koons, actor Will Smith, and Ali\'s storied trainer, Angelo Dundee.
www.taschen-goat.com

Vernissage
The Vernissage, the private showing of selected works, was so highly anticipated that Art Basel organizers staged not one but two previews for the most highly motivated collectors. Some works fetched up to $5 million but there were plenty of \"yellow dots\" around as well?works by up-and-coming young artists that could be had for $5,000 or less, like Los Angeles Projects gallery artist Rodney McMillian\'s Chair. McMillian found the piece of furniture, which looks as if it had been sat in by several generations of Archie Bunkers, on the streets of Los Angeles and turned it into a still-life meditation on the fate of every object designed to be used day in and day out by humans.

Cube Project / Sara Modiano Artist Sara Modiano\'s 16-inch open cubes-made out of sewn wire mesh-started out as a sculpture entitled Ser (\"\'to be,\" in the Colombian artist\'s native Spanish). But stacked, conjoined, and hung in various configurations, dozens of her cubes turned the Glottman Anteprima studios in the Design District into a collection of diaphanously divided spaces whose edges were just solid enough not to walk through, but light enough to become three-dimensional canvases, refracting projected images, light, and shadow,
www.wheremindscreate.com/cube

Art Positions
Younger, cutting-edge galleries were given their own unique space at Art Basel called \"Art Positions\" where they exhibited their works inside converted metal shipping containers once used on commercial vessels, lined along the beach. Folks strolling past Madrid\'s Espacio Minimo Galerie\'s container were startled by Enrique Marty\'s Tourist, One Day at the Beach-a prone sculpture of a man (modeled on Marty\'s father) covered by sand . . . except for his hands, feet, and head, all poking skyward. But one could easily recover from that experience at the near by Container Cafe, where one could contemplate the transformation of Miami into an art Mecca.

Three unique approaches to urban planning all hope for similar endings ? lively neighborhoods that will help put the center back in the city.

"Urban redevelopment" ? unlike its predecessor, "urban renewal," with its grim intimations of the wrecking ball, mass displacement, and architectural inhumanity ? is a flexible term with multiple definitions. As current projects in Detroit, Miami, and New York suggest, a new generation of architects, planners, and developers is creating imaginative new strategies for reweaving the frayed fabric of America's cities. Collectively, they point to an embrace of New Urbanism's old-fashioned faith in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods even as the complexities of power, profit, and identity pluck at the threads of that fabric.

Of the three projects, Detroit's Far East Side plan is the most ambitious. A 15-year initiative scheduled for completion in 2015, involving the reconstruction of 1,200 devastated acres in one of the U.S.'s most devastated cities, it is the largest such project in the nation. Recognizing its own lack of expertise, the city turned the job of master planner over to the Detroit-based architecture/urban design office Archive DS. The firm's name reflects its method of documenting what president Mark Nickita describes as "proper and prosperous urban areas from around the world" and using these examples to develop regeneration strategies for blighted cities. In Detroit, Nickita and partners began by minutely documenting the two-square-mile zone: They videotaped blocks to capture their condition, photographed different housing typologies, and measured street widths to determine how big structures could be. Thus armed, the team designated nearly 5,000 new housing units at different price points, established design guidelines that preserved the area?s historical precedents, and even sketched streetscapes as inspiration for developers.

Archive DS also rejected past redevelopment precedents. Rather than a single zone with one commercial district, the firm shaped nine distinct communities, each featuring accepted components of a successful neighborhood, including a center and an edge, multiple uses, and different types of housing. And instead of evicting the roughly 4,000 souls who'd endured through decades of decay and bulldozing their homes, Archive DS designed the new project around them.

In Miami, the $100 million revitalization of the city's 18-square-block Design District suggests that a similar approach can work within a very different set of circumstances. The vision of developer Craig Robins, owner and president of Dacra, the project includes dividing an overlong city block with a new street and inserting an oak-lined plaza, a ten-story design showroom/office building, and a pair of what Robins describes as "Miesian courtyard house prototypes," all designed by a slate of forward-thinking architects and planners. The aim is to reinvent what one writer called "a blighted industrial landscape" as a hip live/work/play zone, driven by design and architecture, its long-term viability ensured ? as in Detroit ? by sound planning.

Like its Midwestern counterpart, the Miami project ? which should be completed by the end of 2005 ? focuses on the design of the entire area from a strong New Urbanist perspective. "I always realized South Beach was a movement as much as a place," Robins says of the district he helped to redevelop. "It was a way of thinking about neighborhoods that had gotten lost ? especially in the '8os, when we got away from interesting downtowns, and began to build vertical and horizontal suburbs." Unlike Detroit, however, Robins is betting on modernism, Miami-style. Using contemporary design to express the district's aspirations, he believes, "immediately makes it into a neighborhood that has an identity."

Robins's efforts have attracted many arts-related businesses and launched a process that is transforming not only the area but the city itself. The district's urbane stew of art, architecture, and design suggests that culture, if thoughtfully supported, remains a reliable catalyst for redevelopment.

"People respect and value creativity," Robins says. "It's not just about manufacturing commodity space."

Unless, of course, it is. Both Detroit and Miami are second-tier cities, in which the need for creative strategies to attract money and interest, and the willingness of local governments to step aside, helped produce dynamic solutions for areas that were nearly blank slates. In a world-power city like New York, however, where the bureaucracy remains active, the market is hot, and any intervention can release a hornet's nest of issues, things are different.

In Harlem, one such project, intended to create affordable housing for people already living in a neighborhood where only 13 percent of residents are owners, is under way. The Abyssinian Development Corporation, a non-profit dedicated to the revitalization of Harlem, formed a partnership with the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) to restore four townhouses, scheduled for completion in the next few weeks, for lottery-selected ownership, two of them on Astor Row, a street of gracious brick homes distinguished by their wooden front porches and wrought-iron fences. Because these properties are landmarked, their exteriors were restored and the interiors redesigned to include duplexes for the owners as well as two rental properties.

The story's particulars reveal a set of challenges entirely different from those faced elsewhere. New York's HPD mandates that structures rehabilitated under its aegis be restored to their previous levels of quality and occupancy; as the agency mostly deals with once-derelict properties meant to be "affordable," this can translate into utilitarian fixtures, cheap finishes, and tiny rooms. In the case of Astor Row, the intended results were homes suitable for middle-class buyers; but, according to Zevilla Jackson Preston, the Harlem-based architect who planned the interiors, HPD was reluctant to break with policy, objecting to the large rooms and inclusion of such modest luxuries as a hot tub. "People actually said to me, You're making this too nice,'" Preston recalls.

Nor are the complications confined to policy. Though hardly exorbitant, the rents on the leasable units within the Astor Row houses, Preston observes, will exclude most of the neighborhood population. So you're an owner in your own community, but the people who rent from you are not from the neighborhood. Then it becomes, What is Harlem, who is Harlem, who should and should not be here, and what does all of that mean?"

Harlem is, of course, what the Far East Side and Design District aspire to be: a walkable, mixed-use neighborhood, with an exceptionally distinctive personality. The challenge is to improve it without erasing Harlem's character and culture and leaving nothing but a generically pretty urban visage of chain stores and multiplexes.

"Do they want the cultural aspects of it?" Preston asks of the many boho-riche newcomers to her neighborhood. "Or is it just about the real estate: We want the land, we'll take the buildings, and goodbye'?" It's a question that America's architects, planners, and citizens must ask, and ask again, as we remake our cities.