Not a warehouse. Not a factory. A modular cultural city for South Florida. The foundation stays fixed; the public-facing character, art and program layers are shaped with the people who will use it.
Every figure on this page is a design target or an estimate. None of it has been through an engineer, and no land has been bought. Site selection is in progress in South Florida.
The same sixteen zones as the plan below, built to metres out of shipping containers at their real dimensions, and lit six ways. It is a drawing of a design target, not a photograph of anything that exists. Everything it shows is also written underneath it, because a model that is the only way to understand the place would exclude anyone whose machine cannot draw it.
These are permanent cameras in the model, not screenshots somebody took once. They are written into the build alongside the geometry, so moving a district moves the camera that looks at it and the picture on this page is regenerated with the rest of the city. Nothing here has been built. Nobody in these pictures is a real person and no crowd here is a measurement of anything.
Every picture on this page is a render of the model in site/media/3d, which is generated from site/data/cargo-plan.json by scripts/build_cargo_city.py. None of it has been through an engineer, no land has been bought, and the people in it are there so the drawing has a sense of scale.
None of this is a schedule and none of it is a guarantee. It is what the plan is for. The four things that have to be true in any room before we would call it ours.
We measure at the edge of the district, not at the desk. Go over the limit for 3 minutes and the power cuts.
Cargo City should spend money where it actually matters. Shade. Drainage. Power that stays on. Water. Getting in and out. Buildings you can move. The goal is not a huge fancy complex. It is a small campus we can build again somewhere else, that survives South Florida weather and still feels like a neighborhood.
A planted sand ridge along the edge can slow shallow flood water. That is one layer, not the answer. It needs help. Planted ditches that soak up rain. Ponds that hold it. Paving that lets water through. Floors built up higher. Valves that stop water backing up the pipes. And proper tanks to store it, designed by an engineer.
Use a bright roof that bounces heat away and meets the Florida code. Put solar panels on covers over the parking and the work areas. Add batteries. Run the power in three separate loops, so if one loop breaks the rest of the site keeps working.
Put the trucks, the bins, the kitchens, the pipes and the emergency route along one back edge. Then visitors walk a short shaded loop. They never have to cross a truck lane.
A strong candidate area is the Opa-locka industrial district around the Ali-Baba Avenue / rail corridor: it already contains industrial land, has an Opa-locka Tri-Rail station, and the city is actively planning redevelopment and multimodal growth. This is a candidate area, not a selected parcel.
Before any commitment: parcel-by-parcel zoning, airport height/flight restrictions, flood elevation, stormwater capacity, environmental conditions, access, noise, neighbors and transit connectivity must be verified.
The frame, the safety rules, the pipes and the step-free routes are the base. The public votes on the parts that should belong to the neighborhood: façade families, public art zones, color stories, gathering spaces, bus livery and selected program ideas.
Open the voteWinning directions become briefs. Local and visiting artists can then propose murals, sculpture, installations, container interiors, lighting and sound environments against the same site rules.
Open the Art DeskCargo Kids Lab introduces making and science early. The college path turns the site into a real studio. Students work on shows, buildings, green systems, media and music tech.
A double-decker bus built as a stage. Music on the top deck. A lounge, a work space and charging below. Lights on the roof, a DJ booth, walls you can project on, a cool place to sit down, and some solar power to help run it. The final exterior is an artist-voted livery, not a fixed corporate wrap.
The demo is intentionally simple: observe → protect wildlife → remove only what is appropriate → weigh and document → route material responsibly → publish the result. No invented cleanup numbers, no claim that removal is harmless, and no machine presented as a solution before it is tested.
Open the sargassum demoA district is a place. A system is a rule that crosses every place. Four of these are drawn on the plan above. Turn on Architecture to see the streets, the shade and the lifts, or Resilience to see water, power and the emergency routes.
Three kinds of street and no more. Two primary routes carry everybody and cross in the middle of the site. Four secondary streets link district to district. One service edge runs along the south boundary. The routes are not drawn over the plan, they run down the gaps the sixteen zones already leave between them.
The ruleA truck route never crosses a walking route. On the plan · StreetsShade is treated as infrastructure, not decoration, and it is drawn over the streets rather than over the plots. The walk between two districts is the part that puts a person in the sun at two in the afternoon in August. The Garden District plants its own shade. Everywhere else it gets built.
The ruleMinimum 0.25 square metres of shade per person on site. On the plan · ShadeOne back-of-house edge. Every delivery, every generator swap, every waste run and every crew vehicle uses it. It is the constraint the rest of the layout is arranged around rather than the space left over once the nice parts were placed.
The ruleNothing is delivered through a district. On the plan · StreetsA planted perimeter berm, bioswales along the street grid and three retention basins. Rain that lands on the site is slowed and held rather than pushed straight at a storm drain. In South Florida this system decides where everything else can go, so it gets drawn first and moved last.
The ruleFree drinking water within twenty steps of the gate. On the plan · WaterThree independent rings rather than one loop. A break in one ring is not a break in the other two. That is the whole reason for the expense: the Recovery District and the Signal Yard do not go dark because the main stage lost a feed.
The ruleCare and communications are never on the same ring as the show. On the plan · PowerFour stacked structures, four lifts. The Sky Deck already carries the promise that there is lift access to every level with no exceptions. This is that promise turned into something a drawing can be checked against.
The ruleNothing gets stacked without its lift drawn at the same time. On the plan · VerticalThe Recovery District sits on a primary street, so help travels on the widest route on site rather than squeezing through the crowd. Two forward posts sit inside the busiest districts. There are no response radii drawn on the plan, because the scale on it is marked indicative and a circle would look like a measurement.
The ruleSightline gaps held open for medics every fifteen metres in the Voltage District. On the plan · EmergencyEvery zone publishes a ceiling in decibels, and the plan is arranged so the quiet ones are not pressed up against the loud one. The Quiet Quarter and the Voltage District sit apart on purpose. Escape from the noise is a layout decision before it is a policy.
The rule104 dB at the Voltage boundary. 65 dB in the Quiet Quarter. No exceptions for anyone. On the plan · SoundEverything arrives in a box that becomes a building, so the largest material decision on the project is made before anything is delivered. Sorting happens at every exit. How much actually gets diverted is not a number that can go on this page until an event has happened and been measured.
The ruleCompost and sorting at every exit.Water, shade and medics come before a stage. A stage with none of those is the thing this whole project exists as an alternative to, so it would be strange to build one first.
The berm, the service spine, power ring one, and the three zones that let a small event happen safely. Nothing here is a stage.
The first phase with a main stage in it, and it is deliberately second. The Quiet Quarter opens in the same phase as the loudest district, never after it.
The parts that make it a neighbourhood rather than a site. None of these are needed to run an event, which is exactly why they are the ones most projects never get to.
There are no dates on this board on purpose. There is no land, no budget and no permit, so a date would be a decoration. The order is a real decision. The timing is not one we get to make yet.
One kind of box means one set of load math. One crane. One crew who knows how it all fits together. You can move the whole city in a weekend. The bones underneath never change.
The Party Builder models an event here. It uses the Standard to work out what you owe the crowd.
