Innovative solutions, collaborations and community engagement are essential for coastal cities.
With our Future of Cities HQ based in Miami, coastal resilience is at the heart of our mission to transform urban environments into sustainable, thriving ecosystems. The ReefLine’s 7-mile underwater sculpture park represents a shared commitment to innovation, environmental stewardship, and community engagement while revealing the complexities of implementing such a project with the ocean floor as its canvas. This initiative lays the foundation for cross-sector collaborations merging public art, creative placemaking, marine & material science with regenerative development.
The Power in Cross-Sector Collaboration
Located off Miami Beach, this seven-mile underwater sculpture park offers a regenerative solution to coastal cities while celebrating Miami’s unique cultural identity. The ReefLine is founded on the principle that “artistic creation can pave the way for nature-positive scientific innovation.”
Making The ReefLine is extremely complex. It takes many different experts coming together. It takes architects, engineers, scientists, artists, policymakers, lawyers. And a lot, a lot of love.
— Ximena Caminos, Founder & Artistic Director of The ReefLine
Collaboration is essential for The ReefLine’s success. Experts from diverse fields — including architects, marine biologists, artists, and engineers — are coming together to bring this ambitious project to life.
Why Miami? Coastal Resilience Through Regeneration
Miami is the Atlantis of our generation, and there’s no better place to prototype solutions like what’s happening here.
— Tony Cho, Founder of Future of Cities
Miami Beach’s unique geography and cultural diversity make it the perfect location for The ReefLine to be deployed as a demonstration of art, ecology & community engagement for nature-positive scientific innovation. The ReefLine’s innovative approach combines the imagination of artists with the observations of scientists, engineers and architects to cultivate ecosystems and connect communities.
We strongly feel that this could have only happened in Miami, because I think Miami is a converging point of many cultures, but also land and ocean, art and leisure.
— Shohei Shigematsu, Master Architect, OMA NY
Eco-Innovations for Community Engagement
One of our innovations with Reef Cells and Ocean Rescue Alliance is the Coral Lock. It’s a threaded frag plug where you can simply screw in a coral fragment like a bolt. A ten-year-old could do it.
— Collin Foord, Coral Expert / Marine Biologist — Founder of Coral Morphologic & Coral City Camera
The “Coral Lock System” empowers the community to actively participate in reef restoration. Coral fragments grown in local labs are planted on the reef structures, creating opportunities for people of all ages to contribute directly to Miami’s coastal resilience.
Doing a master plan underwater, we have to make a kind of infrastructure and cultural infrastructure that could serve humans — but not only humans, also the creatures in the ocean.
— Shohei Shigematsu, Master Architect, OMA
A Model for the Future
Future of Cities’ partnership with The ReefLine demonstrates the transformative power of regenerative development. By integrating ecological restoration with cultural expression, this collaboration not only protects Miami’s coastline but also serves as a replicable model for other coastal cities worldwide.
This project is exactly why we created The Climate & Innovation HUB — to host, support, and cultivate conscious, eco-driven communities using art, culture, and creative vision to tackle the biggest challenges facing our cities.
— Tony Cho, Founder, Future of Cities
Visit the Climate & Innovation HUB powered by Future of Cities in Little Haiti, Miami, where you can see, feel and touch the prototypes of the Miami Reef Star — designed by artist Carlos Betancourt and architect Alberto Latorre — to be deployed in Phase 2 of the underwater sculpture park (2025–2026).
Learn more about The ReefLine at thereefline.org and join the movement with Future of Cities to stay at the cutting edge of urban innovations for regeneration and transformation.