At the conclusion of Architecture Sarasota’s 2024-25 Downtown Series, in which six leading urban experts, including creator of the 2001 Downtown Master Plan Andres Duany, analyzed the growth of downtown, President Morris (Marty) Hylton asked the experts what their critiques of the city were. The answer, Hylton reveals, was unanimous. “They all asked, ‘what is going on with our Bayfront?’” says Hylton. “They all talked about how such a critical, core urban space for the community was one, being underutilized, and two, not the vibrant public space that it could be.” For Sarasota, the water—specifically the Bayfront—is more than just a part of the city’s cultural, natural and economic identities. It is a lens—through which one can see a history of human settlement, industrial infilling and the United States highway system—an entryway to the  immense beauty within the region’s subtropical climate and a barrier between the catastrophic power that the environment holds and downtown Sarasota. Spurred on by Architecture Sarasota’s Downtown series, city planners have begun the long process of updating Duany’s 2001 Downtown Master Plan. An understanding of Bayfront, in every aspect, is crucial to the process. In 2025, Architecture Sarasota partnered with Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design on a study of Sarasota’s Bayfront. The study was the result of a project-based seminar titled Climate Case: Subtropical Urbanism, taught by Chris Reed, Professor of Practice at Harvard GSD and founding director of STOSS Landscape Urbanism. Ten graduate students from various disciplines created five student teams to dissect research topics with the goal of creating a toolkit—one that could aid city officials, architects and urban planners in forging Sarasota’s next chapter by the water.  Reed was drawn to the topic for two reasons. “I had been to Sarasota before and knew that there was an incredible design culture down here and that this is a place that values art and culture as much as it values landscape and environment, which was one draw,” he says. “And the fact that Sarasota had been battered by storms and hurricanes made this study very present. Climate resilience and adaptation is very much the center of what I do and what I teach.” Instead of creating a master plan for what Sarasota’s Bayfront could look like, Reed directed his class to think of the study as a series of toolkits applicable for addressing different areas of concern in future planning. “It allowed us to start thinking proactively about solutions, rather than just researching the problem. If you’re dealing with stormwater, you can look at this way, that way or the other way. If you’re looking at issues of heat, what are the tools that could be put together to address that?” says Reed.  The students—who visited Sarasota in March 2025—systematically researched every angle of Sarasota’s Bayfront, from the historic land development and settling patterns dating back to indigenous inhabitation, to current and future climate threats from ocean flooding and rising sea levels to biodiversity, urban heat mapping and even the governance of the Bayfront. “At the end of the semester, we wanted to show how some of those toolkits can converge and be used together. Oftentimes one group of students would create drawings that were literally on top of the other group’s drawings, because one group was looking at wave attenuation and earth movement, but a second group was examining the vegetation you might plant there to create biodiversity,” says Reed. “In Sarasota, there's an absolutely unique opportunity that other cities don't have. It’s encouraging that the city and organizations like Architecture Sarasota are starting to have these very robust conversations about what is the future of this place. How do we deal with these challenges, but do so in a way that helps us move forward?”