Lectures
Presentation February 14, 1996 at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles. Sorkin begins by describing the thirty minute walk from his apartment in New York to his office studio. This journey leads to a critique of the human and built components that both bind and divide the city, as well as current processes which drive cities increasingly toward the virtual. Walter Hudson, the world’s fattest human, and paradigmatic citizen of the post-electronic city, represents a new revolutionary in this disembodying system. The radical re-situating of the body through this process threatens our subjectivity, and the concurrent mediation degrades democracy by inhibiting free association.
Presentation at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles, given November 6, 2002.
Presentation of Pro Eutopia at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles, given February 17, 2010. This talk stressed the concepts of asymmetry and freedom and the political organization of urbanism.
A lecture on sustainable cities, given October 2, 2012 at the Sustainable Solutions Conference in Rotterdam.
Design Talks: A Conversation with Michael Sorkin and James Wines, hosted by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, March 28, 2014.
How Green is My City?, given October 13, 2014 at Sci-Arc, Los Angeles. Michael argues that as the globe urbanizes, the city as a sustainable, equitable and beautiful site of social possibilities is disappearing. He discusses his projects for new cities in Arizona and China, and describes his research into ways of enabling New York City to produce its own food.
Michael speaks in Prague at the 2015 reSITE festival on how the idea of urban autonomy permeates his projects, from a fantastical city of Weed, Arizona to his current projects in New York. Throughout the lecture, he touches on what truly makes cities sustainable and how we can turn the contemporary urban ills into equitable cities of the future.
City States, given November 11th, 2015 at BRAC Centre, Mohakhali, Dhaka, Bangladesh. The lecture started with highlighting the phenomenon of how fast megacities are growing and what are the new problems it is bringing along. He showed some comparisons and latest data about Dhaka, how Dhaka is uniquely growing rapidly with tremendous density. He also talked about the problem of contrasting unequal distribution of wealth in major cities around the world, and showed example of designing cities with more green vertically or horizontally, a society more equal and sensitive to the environment.
City States, presented at Westminster University Nov 26, 2015.
Hot Air: RIghts or What? From the MAS Summit, Tuesday, November 15, New York City.
Fight the Stupid City!, given at the Urban IQ conference January 18, 2019 at University of Toronto.