How do you change a city’s conversation about transportation?

Today, we’re announcing a new partnership with Miami-Dade County’s Department of Transportation and Public Works

(MDCDTPW, for short 😂) Working with our friends at Prism Music Group, we’re launching a campaign to redefine transportation, foster a new mobility conversation among Miamians, and build engagement and participation. This project is close to our hearts and our purpose as a company, so I wanted to share details on what we’re doing, how we’ll be doing it, and how it relates to The New Tropic.

We’re prototyping new project experiences, including how to connect our arts community to the transit conversation. We hired local artist Brian Butler to make a series of fun and interactive transit sketches that we featured across social media last week.

How we get around defines how we see our cities.

Changing how we get around is hard — and it’s harder still to get residents involved in those changes. How can we do better?

When Rebekah Monson, Bruce Pinchbeck Jr., and I started working on WhereBy.Us, we found the importance of mobility validated again and again in our research. Before we launched The New Tropic, we spent months interviewing locals about their experiences, following them on their commutes, waking up with them at obscene hours and standing up in their personal space to get a sense of what it’s like to live here.

One topic emerged stronger than any other: It’s frustrating to get around a growing city like Miami— particularly one born in the age of the automobile. That challenge shapes and influences every other part of how we imagine ourselves in our city.

Residents are rarely invited to engage in big decisions like transit. The last thing most of us want to do with our free time is study up on how metropolitan planning organizations relate to cities and counties and the dozen other indecipherable acronym agencies that call the shots. At the same time, many of those organizations are eager for more residents to join the conversation.

How we work

We publish The New Tropic to provide information and connection to our community of curious locals. We make newsletters, original stories, social media conversations, events, and other things that help connect Miamians. We have a team (led by Ariel Zirulnick) dedicated to that work. Our company keeps the lights on by creating similar work for companies and organizations that want to connect with the people who live here. We help them design engagement strategies, produce research and facilitate innovation, and design custom creative and storytelling that builds conversation with the right people.

We have a separate team that produces client work, so The New Tropic can remain independent and accountable to our community. We publish some of our client work through The New Tropic and our other channels, and branded content is always clearly marked as such.

What we’ll be doing with Miami-Dade County

Over the next few months, we’ll be creating four things, in collaboration with Prism Music Group:

1. A program of storytelling and creative content that explores what’s ahead for Miami’s transit system, takes locals behind the scenes, and unpacks the complexity of executing new ideas for making transit better. The goal of this work is driving conversation, feedback, and community.
2. A series of events on and around transit that encourage us all to use the system and get involved through fun and surprising interactions (like the Miami Soul Train).
3. A Kindness Campaign that will inspire us to be a bit more excellent to each other in public spaces, and explore how we can push for a more human and connected Miami.
4. WhereBy.Us is producing human-centered design research to help understand locals’ transit experiences and goals, and help us design the most effective engagements.

We’re excited about this project, because we can approach it with authenticity: transit is one of the biggest challenges in our city. Our conversation about its future has to be participatory, and has to include every part of our county, if it’s going to be successful. Alice Bravo and her team at the department are embracing this idea. They are choosing to work with us in part because they want this open conversation and two-way engagement.

Our journalism team at The New Tropic will continue to explore transit stories on their own, as they always have, pursuing stories the community suggests and looking for new ways to build connections.

Let us know your questions, concerns, and ideas as we embark on this new adventure.