Envision this: A seven-mile urban Miami waterfront dotted with water-taxi stations, boardwalks and baywalks and promenades, marketplaces and exhibition halls. Floating gardens off Brickell. Mangroves along Edgewater. A nature walk over Biscayne Bay.

Or a monument to global warming in Margaret Pace Park: A small bunch of houses that gradually disappear as the bay waters rise.

In a far-ranging, fire-up-the-imagination exercise of what-could-be, the University of Miami School of Architecture let more than 350 students and 30 faculty members loose for an entire semester to dream up a new waterfront for Miami.

SEE FOR FREE

What they came up with -- now on view in a free exhibit at the Freedom Tower downtown -- covers the waterfront with projects ranging from the quite practical to the highly improbable.

Yet the ideas and their scope, unmatched by anything city planners have ever attempted, plainly mean to inspire new, and sometimes radical, thinking about a patchwork, often-inaccessible waterfront that even politicians admit falls far short of its potential.

''It's where urbanism meets nature,'' Miami City Commission Chairman Joe Sanchez told attendees at a symposium marking the exhibition opening, before adding: ``This city made a lot of mistakes regarding the bay.''

The project encompassed two miles of the Miami River from the Interstate 95 overpass to Biscayne Bay, and the five miles of bayfront from the Rickenbacker Causeway to the Julia Tuttle Causeway. Class work took place during fall 2007.

Some of the projects could be built tomorrow, including water-taxi stations and waterfront walkways with specific dimensions, landscaping and paving. There could be row houses and green pocket parks in the cul-de-sacs in Edgewater, or a restored tree canopy along the Miami River.

`FANTASTICAL THINGS'

Or a network of water taxis and promenades tying together the waterfront and the citizenry.

Other proposals are meant to provoke thought, including several for global-warming art installations, for towers in parks, and parks on the water -- ''some fantastical things, probably even some things you wouldn't want to see on the waterfront,'' said UM architecture dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

'GERMS' OF GREATNESS

But the history of architecture and city-building is filled with instances in which unrealized plans ''can become the germs of great creations,'' UM architecture professor Carrie Penabad told the crowd.

''We are poised to redefine Miami,'' she said, urging city leaders and planners to embrace high aspirations.

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