Michael Sorkin (1948 — 2020)
Dearest Comrades,
Our dear leader Michael Sorkin, the prolific writer, urbanist and architect, passed away on March 26, 2020, from coronavirus.
The Michael Sorkin family, at Terreform, Michael Sorkin Studio, and Urban Research, has been overwhelmed by the response to the news of Michael's passing.
Michael has given us all much work to get on with. You can be reassured that Michael's presence will continue to be all over the map!
Michael was the President of Terreform that he founded in 2005. As with all Michael's work, Terreform was created to further the mission of more equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet. All of Terreform's multiple books are published by its imprint Urban Research, where Michael served as Editor-in-Chief.
In its fifteen years of existence, Terreform has developed a number of proposals for a more just and beautiful New York. Terreform’s beginnings are rooted in the project New York City (Steady) State that sought to answer the question of how can we get the ecological footprint of the city to be equivalent to that of its political boundary? Homegrown is the first volume of New York (Steady) State and will be published in the near future. Outside of New York, Terreform initiated a proposal to ensure that the Obama Library serves as a catalyst for urban development of the South Side of Chicago as a whole.
Terreform, as with Michael himself, has research projects that far exceed the boundaries of the United States. Our first publication this year was to be Open Gaza, a project that reflected Michael's long-standing commitment to the Palestine struggle for social and spatial justice. Other upcoming book projects include: Nanjing Charter, Between Catastrophe and Revolution: Essays in Honor of Mike Davis, Gregory Ain: Low-Cost Modern Housing and the Construction of a Social Landscape, Syria Unsettled and Stupid Cities.
Terreform, New York City, March 26, 2020.