It was with great alacrity then that I met urban planning attorney Andrew Frey in Miami when I was down there just a couple weeks back. Frey started and hosts the annual DawnTown Miami competition--one with an actual site, actual criteria, and actually the ear of Miami's planning bigwigs--whose winners were announced earlier this month.

I met Frey at the Rubell Family Collection, just next to the donut wall, and he told me that for such a site-specific competition (with a new downtown Miami brief each year) he is amazed at how many international entrants he gets. This year first, second, and third place went respectively to Australians, Thais, and Russians.

This year the competition was to reimagine and redesign a downtown Miami transit stop. Presently underserved and unsafe, the designers who took up the cause aimed to help revitalize what is a critical bit of Miami infrastructure, and with continued development downtown (Renzo Piano, Herzog and de Meuron and Cesar Pelli are all building there) access via public transit will grow all the more vital.

Check out the galleries of the winners here and designers, keep your eyes peeled for DawnTown 2010.