Doral Born Again, This Time As A City?

• An aerial rendering of Duany Plater-Zyberk’s master plan for Downtown Doral, via Downtown Doral.

Codina Partners, which already built Doral a classical city hall for $20 million, is planning a bonafide city center with more than 3,000 residential units over eight or nine condo towers, each up to 20 stories high, that, according to renderings, frame a big village green. They’re also building a regular High Street, with at least 70 retail stores and restaurants, and more than a million square feet of office space in four glassy towers, one of which, One Park Square, was built in 2010, before the real estate market crashed. From the dome and columns of City Hall, wide pink sidewalks face a park where a massive, $1 million public art sculpture designed by Miami artist Michele Oka Doner has just been installed in the village green.

Among a handful of other ambitious projects near Downtown Doral is Related’s CityPlace Doral, “a city within a city,” to include hundreds of apartments over a T-shaped block of more than 330,000 square feet of retail. The last piece of the puzzle for a full picture of an urban center in suburban/industrial Doral is coming into play as Codina and America’s biggest homebuilder Lennar Corp. team up to bid on an over 100 acre golf course strategically placed between the Codina and Related projects that is expected to go to market as soon as this week when the owners, a fund tied to the government of Singapore, are in town. Known as the Great White Course, it was formerly part of the Doral Hotel and Country Club. (and is now rented by Trump for the resort) The property is, however zoned for development similar to the urban density being built around it. Downtown Doral, along with the neighboring CityPlace was very much an afterthought for a place that looks and feels incredibly suburban, and yet might be one of South Florida’s greatest urban experiments.