48 observations about New York

Michael Sorkin is regarded as one of the most outstanding authors in the field of architectural discourse. In his collection of 48 short essays titled What Goes Up: The Right and Wrongs to the City published in Czech under the title New York, New York, New York: What benefits and what harms the city, he analyses, with briskness and humour, yet with deep insight, the processes that turned his beloved New York into a city of glittering but hollow skyscrapers and growing inequality. He lays bare how these processes work—from city planning and political deals to the finer points of architectonic design—and isn’t shy about calling out developers, politicians, officials and even starchitects like Santiago Calatrava with his Oculus station, whose projects can be more about branding than substance.

New York yesterday, Prague today

Even though Sorkin’s essays centre on New York and date from 2010–2017, their insights resonate in today’s world and other big cities. Issues he highlights, such as gentrification, housing shortages, the commercialisation of public space, unchecked densification, investment-only apartments, car-driven urbanism, and political deals that derail planning, are more pressing now than ever before. “The panorama of New York is literally a bar chart of investments and profits,” Michael Sorkin notes, and his observations offer valuable lessons for Prague.

"Michael Sorkin draws on a tradition that includes the American-Canadian journalist, writer and activist Jane Jacobs. Like her, he lived his whole life in Greenwich Village, later moving to the gentrified and luxurious Tribeca—a shift that undoubtedly shaped his sharp observations of the world around him. What mattered most to him were equity and equal access to resources rather than the aesthetic qualities of architectural and urban design. Sorkin considered it entirely self-evident that cities should be inclusive and for everyone—a view one can only agree with,” says Ondřej Boháč, director of IPR Prague, introducing the author.

How to read the book?

Sorkin is critical, insightful and funny, and his language is complex but not lacking in wit. It's not easy to get into, and you'll definitely read some paragraphs twice. Yet it's worth it. His views, sophisticated humour, and sympathy for simplicity are perhaps most concentrated in the essay 250 Things an Architect Should Know, where he mentions “the feeling of cold marble under bare feet,” “the insulating properties of glass,” “the difference between a ghetto and a neighbourhood,” alongside “three good places for lunch within walking distance,” “how to calculate an ecological footprint,” “the complete works of Jane Jacobs,” “how to ride a bicycle,” “the wages of construction workers,” and “how to treat interns decently.”

The book need not be read in chronological sequence; indeed, it is better approached otherwise. It is recommended to move between essays selectively, focusing on themes that immediately engage your attention. New York, New York, New York is a distinctive mosaic and homage to this wonderful and crazy city, not a boring textbook.

"Michael Sorkin really knew and loved the metropolis where he lived all his life, with all its vicissitudes and ills. And as a true New Yorker, he expresses this through open criticism of the city and the system from which contemporary New York emerged. This book won't help you love New York if you don't already love it now. You might even love it a little less. Yet it will help you to really understand it—and perhaps many other cities and suburbs along with it," says urbanist and New York lover Rozálie Kašparová in the Czech foreword.

“Sorkin is an immensely erudite thinker, and an accomplished speaker. He writes ten-line sentences that are nonetheless condensed with thought—and loaded with references. He mixes bookish expressions, which you won't find even in more common dictionaries, with New York slang and sometimes even vulgarisms. His arguments are perfectly rational, informed and concrete," adds the book's translator Tereza Pálková.

Who was Michael Sorkin?

Michael Sorkin was an acclaimed architect, urbanist, writer and academic, associated above all with New York. He had a touch of the provocateur, yet more importantly he was a leading voice in the debates over how public spaces should be shaped in cities of the early 21st century. He taught at nearly two dozen prestigious universities around the world. In his private practice, he ran the design firm Michael Sorkin Studio as well as Terreform, a non-profit corporation primarily engaged in environmental planning research. Sorkin was the resident architecture critic for the renowned New York magazine The Village Voice, and later, until his death in 2020, for Nation; in addition, he wrote regularly for the magazines Architectural Review and Architectural Record, whose editor-in-chief said of him: "I thought of Michael as a kind of bomb thrower because his articles always shook something up." New York, New York, New York is his first book translated into Czech.