Imaging the Region: South Florida via Indicators and Public Opinion

Through the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, CUES has published two reports identifying and tracking environmental, social and economic trends in South Florida. The first report is discussed here, and the second, Regional Shift: South Florida in Transition is described elsewhere on the site.

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Imaging the Region: South Florida via Indicators and Public Opinion was published in early 2001, and defines the principal region-binding forces of place, economy and people and illustrates how their interactions powerfully affect each other.

The principal region-binding forces are place, economy and people. Each of these forces is important in it's own way, but it is especially useful to think of how their interactions even more powerfully determine the organization of the region. For example, the characteristics of place strongly affect regional economic activities. Those economic activities in turn reinforce certain place qualities while altering others. South Florida's sun and beaches attract people to settle here. But the pressure of population growth, in turn, pushes against and reshapes our landscape, for example, transforming large parts of the Everglades into suburban development and agricultural areas.

This report is organized by the overlap of region-binding forces, or by lenses. The idea of a lens is to help us image the region, to take a step back and see and understand its form and structure. Three lenses are considered here: Place and Economy, People and Economy, and Place and People.

These lenses will enable the reader to see the many ways that the region functions as an integral whole. Another goal is to help stimulate regional action. Toward this latter goal, key performance indicators drawn from the entire report are summarized on page five. This summary is a kind of "report card" suggesting areas where the region exhibits strength, as well as areas where it needs to be strengthened.

To download the entire report to your computer, right-click on this link, and select "Save target as" or "Save file as." This is an 8 mb Acrobat (pdf) file and requires the Acrobat plugin. Click on the buttons on the left column for summary information on the report.

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