That Craig Robins, the design impresario who helped revitalize South Beach and, more recently, reclaim Miamiıs Design District, is creating a gated residential community on an island off Miami Beach is news not just to the architecture world but to anyone tracking the zeitgeist: hip hunkers down. But after September 11, the appeal of a gated community may be less the gate (which seems futile in the face of 2lst century threats) and more the community (now essential for any kind of comfortable existence). Suddenly, people want to know their neighbors ‹ want to make eye contact in public ‹which is a boon for the new urbanist philosophy that animates Robinsı new venture, called Aqua.

A Miami native, Robins has spent enough time in Europe (not to mention New York and San Francisco) to appreciate the value of a close-knit urban fabric. Of course, Robins is a developer ‹ he is investing £l0l.5m in Aqua ‹ and not an academic. Which may explain why his plan for the southern tip of Allison Island doesnıt reject the car culture entirely. Each of its 46 townhouses will have a two-car garage, and the three apartment buildings, containing 120 condo units, will share 330 parking spaces.

So residents will drive to Allison Island. But once there, perhaps theyıll walk around to the pool, to the store, to the sculptures from Robins' collection, which will dot the 3.5ha (8.5 acre) site. Robins has gone to great lengths to see that they do instead of selling the choice land at the edges of the island, he created places for residents to gather, and ensured that the surrounding Indian Creek is visible from every street.

Although the security gate seems anathema to the new urbanist vision, Aqua is very much the brainchild of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the new urbanist gurus (and Miami residents) hired by Robins to design the site plan. Duany and Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) have been preaching the New You gospel for nearly 30 years. But what theyıve built ‹ most notably two Florida towns: Seaside, the setting for The Truman Show; and Windsor, where the Prince of Wales plays polo looks quaint rather than cutting-edge. It's as if developers have hedged their bets, disguising smart site plans with saccharine detailing.

Robins could help them prove that it doesnıt take gingerbread to attract residents to new urbanist communities. His young New York and Miami architects are working in a modernist idiom or rather idioms from international style to what could be called "streamlined deco". The stucco buildings will run an equally narrow spectrum from white to pale yellow, green, and pink. The result, if all goes well, will suggest what a Florida town designed by Aalto, Corbu and Mies might have looked like.

That isnıt so far-fetched. "Corbu designed townhouses four or five of them," says Alexander Gorlin, author of The New American Town House (and one of the architects at Aqua). According to Gorlin, the reason the architect isnıt associated with townhouses is that he never wrote about them. "Corbu's Ville Radieuse didn't include the townhouse as a type," he explains. "Because by then his ideology was virulently anti-street." Not only is its style modernist, but Aqua's density approximately 20 units per 0.4ha (1 acre) is far higher than that of most new urbanism towns. Says Gorlin: "Craig is trying to help the new urbanism, which has been exiled to the suburbs, return home."

Gorlin designed one of the three big buildings at the eastern edge of the Aqua site. It is designated The Gorlin on the elaborate sales brochures. "I love any developer who names a building after me," jokes the architect. Walter Chatham designed another of the big buildings. (Itıs fitting that Robins hired Chatham, who at Seaside interpreted the DPZ "zoning" in a way that let him create a subversively modern house.) The third of the big buildings is by Miami architect Alison Spear

At just 11 story's, they help soften the transition from the wall of oceanfront towers, some 40 story's high, to the east of Allison Island, and the low-slung private houses to the west.

Gorlin and Chatham have also designed townhouses at Aqua, along with architects Hariri & Hariri, Brown Demandt, Emanuela Frattini Magnusson (EFT Design), Suzanne Martinson, Albaisa Musumano, Allan T Shulman, and DPZ. Each design will repeat five or six times, and all the houses will be built at once, giving economies of scale. Wolfgang Alvarez, a Miami firm, is doing working drawings for all the buildings.

Robins has created communities before ‹ he was a prime mover in the revitalization of South Beach. For 15 years, the only thing more ubiquitous than bikinis were signs for Dacra, Robinsı company. More recently, he turned a series of under  utilized buildings in Miami into a design district which, on a recent visit, was humming with activity.

Robins was born 38 years ago at St Francis Hospital on Allison Island, Miami Beach. Ironically, his crews have just finished demolishing the hospital. With demolition going on just a few yards away, Robins presides over a sales office that stands where there will soon be a communal swimming pool at the prow of the ship-shaped island.

In the office stands a model of the three large buildings and 46 townhouses, correctly oriented, for buyers to envision the view from each of their new windows. For decades, critics have said that modernism has produced great buildings but lousy cities. Robins, leaning over his model the way he will soon look down from the roof of the Gorlin or the Spear or the Chatham, has a chance to prove the old saw wrong.