On a sunny Saturday in March, two men with French accents sipped cappuccinos outside Miami’s Orange Café & Art. Down the street, a German photo crew wrapped up a catalog shoot. Waiters folded napkins at a courtyard restaurant with white couches surrounding a large banyan tree.

You might call it South Beach Two. But not yet.

In the past several years, a handful of Miami developers have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to create the next hipster hotspots. Craig Robins and father-son team Tony and Joey Goldman, developers largely credited with the revitalization of South Beach in the late 1980s, are leading the transformation, focusing on the Design District and Wynwood, respectively.

A 10-minute drive north of downtown, these once-dangerous areas are easy to reach from Interstate 95. They’re not on the water. They’re not lushly planted. But each has an urban vibe that the developers believe can be cultivated into the quintessence of cool.  

“South Beach was a transformation of what Miami was all about, a movement toward a more European, pedestrian-friendly, aesthetically oriented neighborhood,” Robins says. “After Lincoln Road, there was no place for the movement part of South Beach to grow. This is the logical extension.”

As they did in South Beach, the developers are buying buildings and restoring historic properties. An equally—perhaps even more—important part of the plan is a strategy that has been used elsewhere: offering free space to attract artists and art organizations. Both Robins and the Goldmans are collectors and patrons whose interest in the arts dovetails with their belief that creative types can lay the foundations of a vibrant new community.

The hitch: timing. The residential real estate bubble has burst in South Florida, with prices down about 20 percent since December 2006, according to the S&P Case-Shiller home-price index. The number of condo and single-family home sales fell by 40 percent last year, and owners are scrambling to rent condos they can’t unload. Local papers carry lawyers’ ads for buyers eager to break preconstruction contracts. Vacancy rates for warehouse and office space are rising too, says Chris Lafakis, an associate economist covering Florida at Moody’s Economy.com.

Robins began turning his attention to the Design District in 2000. He and his company, Dacra, have worked with architects to restore ’20s- and ’30s-era buildings, attract upscale stores such as Fendi and Ligne Roset, and provide free studio space to a dozen artists, the alternative nonprofit gallery Moore Space, and the Haitian Heritage Museum. Robins launched an international design fair called Design Miami in 2005 and recently announced plans to invest another $250 million in the district.

Adjoining the neighborhood to the south, Wynwood is a sprawling area of cement-block warehouses and former manufacturing plants with hand-stenciled signs reading SHOES, SNEAKERS, SANDALS. The desolate, bleak setting is hardly the place you’d expect to find spaces housing works by artists such as Richard Serra, Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, and Andy Warhol—but you do. Starting in the late 1990s, several of the city’s biggest private collectors opened public galleries in the massive spaces here, including the Rubell family in 1996 and Martin Margulies in 1999.