“The 1000-minute city (the city is everywhere)” is the theme of the fifth edition of Utopian Hours, the festival of “making cities”: the ideas, projects and places that are bettering life in cities around the world.

The festival celebrates the thinking of a visionary architect who recently passed away. Deen Sharp of Terreform Center for Advanced Urban Research will tell us from New York about the cultural legacy left by its founder.

Disappeared in 2020 due to Covid-19, Michael Sorkin inspired students and city lovers to use architecture to change the way we conceive and experience the city. Through a political and social lens, the architect has sought, including through theoretical research, to build the ideal city, approaching China for this purpose – where he has been able to experiment and design new urban spaces from scratch. 

Directly from New York, Deen Sharp will tell us about the work of Terreform, through which Sorkin wanted to explore the city as the highest expression of architecture. A place capable of modelling people’s lives, behaviour and thinking. An experiment in social engineering through which to design the ultimate meaning of architecture, in the relationship between society and the environment.

For 2021, Torino Stratosferica dedicates the Utopian Hours visual to Michael Sorkin. The project of an ideal city in Spa Tokaj, Hungary, was reworked by drawing on the illustrative style that can be found in Sorkin’s most famous sketches and drafts. The city, circumscribed but with a central fulcrum from which the urban elements branch out, ideally matches the theme of the fifth edition of the festival – The 1000-minute city.