How Miamis new linear park is using community-centered technology to bridge the digital divide – Brookings Institution

Just a few years ago, no one would have called the vacant land underneath Miamis elevated Metrorail particularly inviting, let alone transformative. But today, the city is reimagining this 10-mile corridor as a dynamic linear park: the Underline. The park will feature walking trails, biking infrastructure, and local art while also providing approximately 250,000 residents and 9 million transit users with free and contiguous high-speed internet.

While people often associate parks and other outdoor public spaces with escaping technology, the Underline is part of a growing movement to leverage community-centered technology to transform public spaces into more accessible, inclusive, and responsive community assets, as well as provide the vital public service of free high-speed internet and technical innovations for more residents. In a city like Miami, where over 30% of households lack internet access, the potential of utilizing public space to bridge the digital divide is especially ripe.

The Underlines recent Phase 1 opening in the half-mile stretch known as Brickell Backyard offers important lessons on the role technology can play in transforming public spaces and encouraging more residents to take part in civic life.

Public spaces have always served as hubs for gathering, forming bonds with neighbors, and forging attachments to place. At first, these critical functions dont seem to align with the role of technology in todays digitized society, which is often seen as a driving force of social division and loneliness. Increasingly, however, philanthropic and government institutions are recognizing the potential of embedding technology within public spacesnot only to increase residents access to technology, but also to bring more residents into public spaces, and therefore into the civic life of their neighborhoods and cities.

Philanthropic organizations like the Knight Foundation have been champions of using technology to connect people and places and pilot new innovations around civic engagement, climate, art, and more in public spaces. In 2019, the foundation provided the Underline with a $925,000 investment to create a technology master plan and hire a chief innovation officer and a chief operating officer. The public sector has also been a critical partner, with Miami-Dade County, the city of Miami, the state of Florida, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and others providing funding for the Underline for construction, park amenities, and features such as drinking fountains, bike repair stations, column signage, and Wi-Fi facilities.

Public and private sector actors cite the benefits of embedding technology in public space as a way to:

Achieving the citys mission of transforming the Underline into a new kind of civic commons equipped with community-centered technology wasnt easy. The Wi-Fi infrastructure has to withstand harsh weather conditions in the free-standing outdoor space, and our fiberoptics technology partner, Hotwire Communications, had to install multiple different access points across the 10-mile linear terrain. After two years of construction, we were able to configure the first phase of the park with 11 Wi-Fi access points designed to provide coverage for as many as 200 people per point.

The parks first phasea half-mile segment called Brickell Backyardopened in February 2021, and has since hosted over 1 million visitors and more than 120 free community programs. Friends of the Underline has also identified additional ways to embed technology within the park, including a new educational mobile app, Dig & Learn (developed by Miami Dade Colleges Miami Animation and Gaming International Complex), that engages visitors to learn about the areas rich cultural diversity, history, and natural assets. Weve also hired a chief innovation officer for the park to provide additional capacity for advancing our technology master plan, which outlines forward-looking goals for using technology for climate resilience, arts engagement, and other critical functions.

Miamis journey to create a new public and virtual civic commons is just beginning. We anticipate adding more than 75 access points throughout the 10-mile outdoor space to provide ubiquitous high-speed internet access and reach many more residents and transit users. Despite initial hurdles, the Underline is proof that big ideas can be mobilized, funded, and implemented in a way that evokes positive transformation for both underutilized urban spaces and members of the surrounding community.

Photo credit: Sam Orberter 2022

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How Miamis new linear park is using community-centered technology to bridge the digital divide - Brookings Institution