Fairly, sustainably, and beautifully.

Jan Kristek: Let's start a bit more generally, but using the specific example of your experience in Turkey, where you worked on several regulatory plans for Istanbul. The result of the current government housing and urban policy in Turkey is the replacement of original informal gecekondu - extensive slum areas - with officially formalized panel housing estates, which are comparable to our panel construction in the 1970s and 80s. What do terms like informality and urban diversity mean to you?

Michael Sorkin: Part of solving the crisis of the modern city will certainly have to involve harmonization and reconciliation between so-called formality and informality. When I studied architecture, we had a high opinion of informal settlement because for us, in a way, it embodied the idea of user self-awareness. We imagined slums to be flexible and thought there was something very democratic about them. However, this view completely overlooked the fact that they are also full of disease, crime, and poverty. In reality, they are terrible in many respects. There is extensive literature on informality, much of which currently questions whether it is even sensible to use this term. Both from the perspective of residents of informal settlements, as no one lives a completely "informal" life, and from the perspective of the government, as governments also utilize informal and flexible tools to enforce official power. A prominent exponent of this topic is Ananya Roy, who teaches at Berkeley. People living in slums partially construct their lives from formal jobs and intersections with the formal sector such as education or transportation.

It is clear that I am an opponent of slums. Slum or ghetto is characterized for me by several things: one of them is deprivation, another is lack of opportunities and services, as well as a complete lack of mobility. The classic American ghetto, the black ghetto for example, was a place where a person had no opportunity to move to another part of the city because they were limited by their race. So I definitely believe in various forms of mobility, but I also believe in the basic right to "stay." A Palestinian from the West Bank or a slum dweller on the slopes of Rio de Janeiro fights for something that is contained in the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms: you have the right to stay where you are if you want.

A more direct answer to your question would be that if governments are dealing with illegal settlements or slums by demolishing them and replacing them with modern high-rise buildings, then in a sense they are just doing the best they can. At least they provide someone with a spacious, hygienic, and economical place to live. However, much more common are aggressive attacks on such places without proposing any alternatives. But there is also a middle path, which can be seen throughout South America, known as the idea of modernization. A certain degree of municipal services - sewage, water, electricity, education - is gradually being introduced into existing communities. Relatively recently, I was in Medellín, Colombia, where there are quite good examples. Illegal settlement on the slopes, previously afflicted by crime, is being modernized by cable cars that allow residents access to public transportation. Those guys [Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, Urban-Think Tank - note by J.K.] think they invented the cable car, but cable cars are actually all over South America. However, the experiment in Medellín is interesting in that the improvements are very extensive. They concern the environment, schools, housing - it's a broadly conceived approach to securing the future for the existing community. I am convinced that this is one of the important strategies.

JK: Let's return to the often-used term urban diversity. What does it specifically mean to you in relation to the topic we are discussing?

MS: Let's break down the meaning of this term a bit. Personally, I assume that there are different kinds of diversity that are interconnected and complement each other. I believe you are asking about social diversity. I am convinced that people should not be segregated by race and class. On the other hand, there is also a certain kind of urban diversity that has to do with the functionality of the city. Zoning is a remnant from a time when functions and social classes were understood as things to be isolated. It is an inherited paradigm that some planners still use today: industry will be located here, blacks over there, and office buildings here. Our work focuses on areas where a mix of people and functions can be ensured, and therefore we deal a lot with the scale of urban neighborhoods. Our research on the environment is fundamentally demand-driven. Let's take transportation as an example. If you want to address transportation based on demand, it will mean that you want to have access to everything without having to use a bus. You should be able to walk to work or school. You should be able to walk to the store.

If you propose that an urban neighborhood must contain a certain diversity and you say that everyone in that neighborhood should have easy access to all diverse functions, then it means that a person cleaning floors and a bank director must live next to each other. The resulting pressure will then compel the search for procedures to manage economic opportunities.

JK: The zoning problems from the perspective of the street and in relation to the scale of the neighborhood, its viability and social diversity have already been described by Jane Jacobs. But why are her theories not being applied today? David Brooks even calls her the first Bobo [bourgeois bohemian], meaning someone who could also be labeled a proto-gentrifier. If you feel a certain kinship with Jane Jacobs, could you explain to us what her critics have overlooked and what the current reflection of her work should look like?

MS: I believe that Jane Jacobs was very perceptive regarding the relationship between morphology and sociability. She was able to perfectly articulate how the form of the neighborhood ensures certain conditions for cooperation, and also how it prevents the effect of alienation in contrast to a homogeneous slum or the high-rise buildings that she so sharply criticized. Jane Jacobs had a certain architectural taste, with which I do not quite agree. She also contributed to creating a taboo of the "forbidden image," a forbidden imagination. Personally, I am dedicated to the idea of utopia, even if it were merely instrumental propaganda. The discourse on modeling various possibilities for future development is something we cannot deny. And that includes those components that Jane Jacobs would condemn as totalizing visions of top-down planning.

I do not subscribe merely to some of her morphological and urban opinions, but also to some of her economic theses. We have two offices: Sorkin Studio, which creates real projects, and Terreform, which focuses on research. Terreform is dedicated to researching the idea of autarky, or the autonomy of the city, partially drawing on Jane Jacobs, whose historical and economic texts describe the mechanism of urban growth and differentiation as a substitute for import.

JK: Is Jane Jacobs not a direct predecessor of today's urban theories such as New Urbanism, which are legitimized by pedestrian transportation, small scale, and subsequent sociality, and which can also be classified as structural determinism? However, the result of their planning are indeed segregated enclaves of the middle class.

MS: It is often assumed that history is just a simple line with a series of points. However, it is much more like a network with clear connections leading from Jane Jacobs to me, as well as to Andrés Duany [a proponent of New Urbanism] or David Harvey. Such connections also lead from Henri Lefebvre. The situation is more complicated. I believe that the blind rejection of Jane Jacobs due to the fact that some of her ideas were adopted by idiots does not do a good service to what is fundamentally correct about her. If it were not for Jane Jacobs, a highway would be running through my house right now.

JK: Jane Jacobs was primarily an activist and journalist at the height of her fame. Do we even need the profession of an urban planner?

MS: That depends on what we mean by urban planner. I am the head of an academic program in urban design, which I know to be a completely false discipline. But I know its origin. In its time, Baron Haussmann was the urban planner, in the 1920s it was the Chicago School - everything was psychologized - and urban planning, which was once a physical discipline, gradually fell into the hands of social sciences. In the 1960s, architects suddenly began to be upset because no one was doing any physical planning anymore. So they invented a discipline that allowed them to reclaim territory that planners had earlier ceded to a kind of statisticians. So we have urban design, which has disproportionately formalized and become foolish, as it does not sufficiently think about the very problems that were so disturbing to planners who left physical practice. It is clear that we need people who are dedicated to the city. We definitely need experts. But we also need to constantly question the boundaries of these so-called disciplines. So yes, of course we need planners. We need people who work for the city, but we must not hyper-professionalize them and say that Pepa, who lives downtown and has some good ideas, is not an urban planner. We need roots of participation.

For example, in New York, a certain revolution took place in the 1960s. The city charter, something like the city constitution, was revised to create community planning districts, which were given money to hire experts and consultants and which had the authority to create local community panels. At that time, we believed that all people were wise. We were simply there as a hand to be guided by their wisdom. It was a system within which local activists gathered people who were interested in the topic and hired a planner to translate their proposals into a plan. That was then sent up the hierarchy to the city. But the system had flaws because the city was not bound by the plan; the plan functioned merely as a recommendation. It will always be a struggle. Because there is no formal power in New York that would initiate anything on the side of the community, community planning always has to fall back on some kind of oppositional politic. Jane Jacobs is part of this tradition. However, it is very difficult to reach a situation where every good idea is heard. So we need planners. However, the content of the term planner must be continuously discussed, criticized, and rediscovered.

JK: Regarding the issue of community planning, I would be interested in your opinion on the High Line, which is praised as a "bottom-up" initiative raised by two members of the community council, Joshua David and Robert Hammond. Has it not resulted in just another corporate and controlled space?

MS: You can bet on that! But causes have consequences - some intended, others not. The High Line was a tremendous success, which unfortunately had a fundamental transformative impact on surrounding properties. The High Line is cool, there is no doubt about it. However, the downside is not only the skyrocketing land prices in the immediate vicinity of the park and the complete gentrification along its length, but also the city's approach, characterized - especially under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg - by the pervasive vision that the park must earn its own maintenance.

So that's the High Line. A few blocks away, however, there is a dilapidated park along the river that is underfunded, losing money, and no one knows how to maintain it [Hudson River Park, note by J.K.]. There are a whole series of typical New York tricks with permitted building heights [so-called air rights, note by J.K.] and properties created with the intention of finding the funding needed for the park. The social geography of open and public space tracks the income demographics of urban neighborhoods. So Central Park is great because of the wealthy people moving around Central Park Conservancy [a form of PPP, public-private park management, note by J.K.]. On one level, it is excellent that Central Park is great because everyone goes there, but on the other side, it is also the reason why apartments on Fifth Avenue sell for 70 million dollars. Unfortunately, capitalism produces all these contradictions. And we can either deepen them, come to terms with them, manipulate them, fine-tune them, or resist them, but we are unlikely to find planning or political practice that solves all problems. That is why we seek moments of weakness and resistance - we constantly negotiate.

JK: You mentioned Mayor Bloomberg. Do you have any reservations about his administration and the activities of the planning department under Amanda Burden's leadership?

MS: In New York, we have a structure known by the acronym PPP - Public Private Partnership, the basic idea of which is that the government should support private profit. The city no longer receives money from the federal government as it used to, for instance, for the construction of certain forms of housing. During Robert Moses's time, around four hundred thousand housing units were built. In some respects, they were terrible, but on the other hand, they were clean, affordable, and decent housing. With the distance from Jane Jacobs's era, we are also beginning to realize that these green enclaves disrupting the New York grid are not so terrible - they can be worked with.

In contrast, today the whole transaction is that if you want to access public funding, you must also somehow obtain private funding. Today's model is thus a kind of agreement in which one public benefit is sacrificed for the creation of another public benefit. And as multiplying the service area of the city is our primary economic activity, air is, in the end, a public resource! [MS refers to the regulation of so-called air rights, effectively regulating the air space above the land, regulating the permitted building height, note by J.K.] So to the extent that a developer is allowed to multiply the [number of floors] service area of the land they own, they can also multiply money. Today's paradigm is: if you do something for us, for the city, we will do something for you. It started with the creation of "public" plazas in private ownership [so-called privately owned public spaces, note by J.K.] or some other form of urban design - arcades, nice facades... At the moment, however, it is also the only strategy to produce [affordable] housing.

Under Bloomberg, the tool of so-called inclusionary zoning was introduced, based on the following exchange: if you provide us with 20% affordable housing (affordable - a very flexible definition!), we will allow you to build a building 30% higher. And de Blasio [a Democrat, current mayor of New York, note by J.K.] basically continues along the same path. So far, not much has been built. It has its problems. One of them is that once the city designates an area where the mentioned bonuses are allowed, there will be enormous speculation with land. People suddenly realize that it is a good investment. This happened, for instance, in eastern New York, in Brooklyn. Buildings - even those being built under the program - will begin to rise with increasing land prices. And we are trying to somehow manage this monster, this beast, which ultimately means constantly catering to some slimy developer. A very problematic way to meet social demands! And as I mentioned, it is always accompanied by sacrificing air rights. One of the reasons zoning limits the height and mass of buildings is that we previously considered it important for the streets to be illuminated and airy.

This is partly related to landmark protection. It concerns the so-called contextual zoning districts. In support of construction, the height limit for new buildings was raised by 31%. Not a good idea! Not only does the entire idea of context disappear, but it would also be more economical to tear down existing buildings and replace them with taller ones. This will result in three things. First: everything will be taller. Second: the character of the neighborhood is irretrievably lost. And third: one of the main needs in securing affordable housing in New York is rent regulation. This is something that started during World War II and was very hard-fought. Various kinds of regulations are gradually disappearing - some will vanish with the death of the tenant, others with the demolition of the building. De Blasio has an ambitious but reasonable plan to build two hundred thousand affordable units in the coming years. However, anyone who makes a more detailed calculation will come to the conclusion that ultimately we will lose a huge amount of units. But you fight where you can...

JK: You are an advocate of rent regulation. Should we be looking for new forms of this regulation?

MS: Of course. However, we do not need new forms; we need to strengthen the old ones. Rent regulation is one logical tool. The return of the government to direct housing construction, just as we build schools and hospitals in New York, should be part of that.

JK: Should the government be a counterbalance to the market?

MS: Certainly, the market is not the answer. We cannot rely on the mercy of the market because the market does not care. But back to these "market manipulations." People often pretend that subsidies do not exist and that corporate public-private partnerships are a good way to bypass public subsidies. Subsidies will always be there if you have egalitarian goals. Subsidies can go to the owner or the tenant, they can come in the form of direct government housing construction, but they can also come at the expense of sacrificing public goods like air space. However, we are wading through subsidies.

You know that one result of subsidy policy in the United States is the suburbs? The entire territory of the suburbs, which everyone believes is the result of autonomous factors, was built because veterans after the Second World War received incredibly cheap government loans. The government built massive highways, spent disproportionate amounts on sewage and other infrastructure, and there were tax write-offs for private properties... Ten thousand subsidies that allowed for the construction of suburbs, and everyone pretends that this is a pure form of capitalism! We must be active in exposing subsidies because the United States is a welfare state for the wealthy corporate sector. I read twenty-five articles every day in the news about how Goldman Sachs pays less tax than its janitor.

JK: You mentioned your own vision of New York as an autarkic city, which you are developing with Terreform. Is this not just one of many techno-utopias?

MS: No, absolutely not. In our design, we only use available technology. We do not apply "anti-gravity paint" or "fusion energy" or anything like that. The goal is rather to minimize technology. Yesterday, we had a meeting in a room where it was hot and humid like it is here now, but there were windows. No one thought to get up and open them until I did. This is the technology that interests me the most. Ninety percent of green architecture is simply about shading, orientation, and natural ventilation. I am not interested in the nonsense about "smart city" and similar technological patches: "If only we had a little more oversight and monitoring, urban problems would be solved. When we know where people are and what they are doing, we can manage them better." No! In the project, I am interested that the world is inevitably heading toward catastrophe. It is warming, there are too many people, and the distribution of planetary resources is fundamentally unjust - out of proportion. Our political premise is that we can no longer rely on the good intentions of a dysfunctional nation-state or the mercy of multinational corporations to solve our own problems. That is why we are concerned with local autonomy. In other words: we consider the question of taking responsibility for our impact on the planet to be critical.

Through our experiment, we are exploring whether there is enough will in the political entity called New York to take responsibility for its impact on the planet. What technologies, morphologies, city reorganizations, or formal proposals can contribute to its transformation? We are essentially doing three things. One of them is patch dynamics, where we explore boundaries. Next, we search for sweet spots - let's say, practically in technical and social terms - on how to increase the level of responsibility. And thirdly, we are compiling an encyclopedia. We are simply creating a massive archive of ways in which others can mobilize to take on their own responsibilities. However, it is not any technological patch because the fundamental starting point is demand. That brings us back to the aforementioned walking: if you move on foot, you do not need mechanical technology for mass movement.

JK: And what about the political aspect of the whole project? Who should implement your vision if we cannot rely on national governments?

MS: While I do not think we can rely on national government, I believe that cities, due to their scale, offer the possibility of a higher level of democracy. So we return to Athens, Hanseatic cities, and all those fantasies about city-states. Through our work, which is undoubtedly influenced by localist politics, we are contributing to this way of thinking. Yesterday we had a meeting with a very young deputy mayor of Prague from the Green Party [Matěj Stropnický, note by J.K.], so when the Greens come to power... In New York, we also have a self-styled, highly progressive Mr. "I was in Nicaragua" as mayor. [MS refers to the radical left past of the current mayor of New York, de Blasio, note by J.K.] And we want to provide him and "our fellow progressives" with tools. Because our design is self-sufficient, it is de facto economic. It is not magic or anything particularly exotic, it is sustainable, based on self-sufficiency, and on replacing imports, so it contains an economic model. You may say it is ridiculous or impractical... Everyone immediately grabs at experiments with import substitution carried out in South America, which have yielded certain results - in increasing literacy, improving maternal health, in local production of staple foods, etc. However, only until the imperialist powers decided that this was closing the market for Coca-Cola. We can no longer afford this!

Ask me whatever you want, but do not be mistaken - everyone can only solve part of the problem. We are also trying to contribute our piece to the answer to a question whose resolution will require collective free will. Should not the United States, the borough of Queens, or the city of New York decide that they will no longer ignore the rest of the world? A practical solution while maintaining decency... I think that would not work. On the other hand: what else would you do with your life besides advocating for something better, something you believe in - this so-called right to the city?

JK: How does one recognize good planning?

MS: It is fair, sustainable, and beautiful.