Positions - Michael Sorkin - Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City
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Positions
July 12, 2018
Positions
Michael Sorkin

Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City

The City is a Res Publica.

The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal.

Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s Public.

Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s private that’s open to the General Public.

Private accommodation, hospitality, commerce, and other services, prospects, events, and possibilities offered to the General Public shall be subject to a Determination of Access by the City Department of Public Access.

The General Public is variably multiple and comprised of an unlimited number of Particular Publics.

The differences among any and all Particular Publics that comprise the General Public shall not be infringed.

No Particular Public shall enjoy free access to Private Spaces, such as domiciles, surgical theaters, dressing rooms, psychoanalytic offices, sensory deprivation chambers, occupied toilets, etc., which are reserved to Restricted Publics, notwithstanding that private persons who choose to exclude all Publics from the Private Space over which they—by reason of law—exercise control of exclusion and admission may also be members of certain Particular Publics and entitled to exercise the rights thereof on Public Occasions and in Public Spaces. The legal standing of all Restricted Publics shall be determined by the City Department of Public Access.

Certain private interests may favor or disfavor certain Particular Publics in certain circumstances.

Children, for example, may be prevented from entering saloons.

Noisy people may, if their noisiness is voluntary and not discontinued after two or more courteous entreaties, be asked to leave the theater.

Clubs (including affinity associations, universities, discotheques, military units, hang-outs, churches, athletic teams, etc.) may determine their core constituencies and memberships from among relevant Particular Publics.

These Particular Publics may be defined by certain shared characteristics at the entire discretion of Clubs or the constituent members of any Particular Public.

Among these characteristics are vocation; taste; thermal preference; nationality in all cases in which it shall be a non-restrictive, fully elective, attribute; and tested capacity, including physical, intellectual, artistic, gustatory, and other non-universally shared capabilities and proclivities. These and all other Particular Publics defined by any chosen, acquired, and hereditary characteristics shall not enjoy any absolute rights of exclusion from their Clubs, neighborhoods, or other milieus of any Individuals who do not embody the characteristic descriptors or other qualities of these Particular Publics, should such Individuals wish to be included in the space or activities of any Particular Public with which they do not share key dispositive markers, inclinations, or capacities.

Although all Individuals shall enjoy the right of access to the spaces of all Particular Publics, no Particular Public acting in its collective and aggregated constitution shall have access to the spaces of another Particular Public without consent of the Particular Public with which it seeks to mix and share.

The City will, within reason, take note of all spaces erected, reserved, or utilized by Particular Publics and will, on application to the City Department of Equity by any other Particular Public that wishes to enjoy similar resources, undertake to provide substantially similar spaces that may be utilized by all of the City’s Particular Publics constituted as a single public, viz. as The General Public.

These spaces shall be designated Public Spaces and shall be fully non-exclusionary, with the universal stipulation that such non-exclusionary spaces must be fully accommodating of all constraining Involuntary Difference.

Public Spaces shall, in the main, be equal or superior in quality and availability to the spaces occupied by any Particular Public to which they are conceived as parallel or reflective.

The cost of creating and maintaining these Public Spaces shall be equitably born by all Individuals comprising the People of the City, via taxation calibrated according to means.

For purposes of this calculation and collection of taxes for the establishment, expansion, and maintenance of the City’s Public Spaces, Corporations shall be considered People too. This corporate responsibility shall not be understood to ipso facto confer any other right generally afforded to The General Public, Particular Publics, or Individuals in the City.

The nature, extent, and on-going determination of form, character, location, and uses of Public Spaces shall not be fixed save by the Full Consent of The General Public nor shall any Public Space, once established, be altered or eliminated without similar Full Consent.

Full Consent to both the creation and elimination of Public Spaces shall not be considered effective in the absence of the Full Consent of all living past and present users of the Public Space in question, as well as of all living or reasonably inferred Prospective Users of the Public Space in question. The rights of Prospective Users, including those unborn or non-resident, shall remain uninfringed upon a Declaration of Interest by any two Individuals, a Particular Public, or by The General Public.

The City will recognize the possibility of frivolous or self-interested assertions of prospective uses in the absence of parties capable of utilizing an unused Public Space within a span of twenty-five years from any assertion of use and shall, upon the application of a minimum of one dozen Individuals, submit the matter to the Court of Prospective Public Uses for adjudication.

Among the Public Spaces that the City shall provide shall be a wide variety of Open Spaces.

Open Spaces shall be freely open to all Individuals, Particular Publics, The General Public, and to the sky.

The Open Spaces of the City may, however, be subjected to reasonable restrictions on use and manner of access but shall not be subject to any restriction of Appropriate Use by time.

Appropriate Uses shall be considered all non-obnoxious, non-infringing uses.

Any restricted or obnoxious uses shall be defined by the City Department of Agriculture and Recreation, and subject to approval by the General Public and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Open Spaces shall occupy a minimum of 50% of the surface area of the earth occupied by the City’s Legal Extent and, for purposes of this calculation, shall consist entirely of an area located at the original level of the earth’s surface, prior to the establishment, construction, or Mapping of the City or any portion thereof, which shall be known as the City Grade.

Pre-existing water bodies within the territory of the City shall not, for purposes of calculation, be considered a part of the City Grade.

Pre-existing communities of flora and fauna, including human communities, shall enjoy the absolute right to remain and to flourish.

In the event that the establishment, construction, or Mapping of the City shall have a material impact on the ability of these communities to flourish within the Mapped Territory of the City, the City shall acquire a contiguous Extra-Territorial Reserve to provide a comparable or superior home for any displaced living ecologies, with the exception of any pre-existing human settlements or habitations, which shall have the right to remain in their original locations forever.

Water bodies added to the City Grade subsequent to its Mapping and Declaration shall not be considered subtractions from the area of the City Grade if they do not, in aggregate, cover more than 10% of the Mapped City Grade which shall be the limit for the addition of water bodies to Public Open Spaces within the City.

No vehicle with a non-human source of motive power, including but not limited to animal, nuclear, internal combustion, electrical, or other sources, is permitted within any Open Space with the exception of certain emergency, service, public transit, and body-augmentation vehicles and devices permitted by the City Department of Access and Mobility. Permitted Vehicles shall be of approved non-emitting, silent, non-aggressive types, and shall conform with any applicable fair trade, labor, and manufacturing regulations as promulgated by the City Department of Equity and the City Department of Environmental Welfare.

A minimum of 65% of the City Grade, inclusive of Open Spaces, shall be planted with trees of species approved by the Department of Agriculture and Recreation, which shall maintain all trees and other fauna and flora in the City’s Public Space.

Any tree that requires replacement for any reason shall be replaced by a tree that maintains or extends the maximum extent of the umbra cast by the original tree being replaced.

The Public Right to Shade shall not be infringed.

Please curb your dog.

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Positions in an initative of e-flux Architecture.

Michael Sorkin was the principal and founder of Michael Sorkin Studio. His practice and work spans design, criticism and pedagogy.

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Certain Regulations Pertaining to Public Space in The City

The City is a Res Publica. The Right to Access to most of the City will be universal. Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s Public. Everyone will be able to go everywhere in the City that’s private that’s open to the General Public. Private accommodation, hospitality, commerce, and other services, prospects, events, and possibilities offered to the General Public shall be subject to a Determination of Access by the City Department of Public Access....
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Shannon Mattern

Sharing is Tables: Furniture for Digital Labor

In 2012, Facebook signed on its one billionth user. To celebrate the occasion, the company commissioned filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu—of Amores Perros and Babel fame—to make their first-ever brand video, “to express what [their] place is on this earth.” 1 Born eight years earlier as a Harvard “hobby,” Facebook had established itself as global socio-technical infrastructure, one that was transforming the way people “get together, open up,” and “feel human,” in the words of the...
V. Mitch McEwen

Profound Modernity

In short, when the muck comes back up onto the sidewalks, it is memory flooding back —a certain long-buried historic past that re-emerges suddenly into the present in the form of a rag, a scrap, a remnant. —Georges Didi-Huberman 1 [W]hat do we do when questions are too big for everybody, and especially when they are much too grand for the writer, that is, for myself? —Bruno Latour 2 This article is not about the damage of the 2017 Central Mexico earthquake, but about...
Ross Exo Adams

Becoming-Infrastructural

It is hard to imagine how the many ruptures that have occurred in the composition of whatever may be called "normality" today do not render canonical architectural knowledge a distant constellation, receding from our present. Nor is it difficult to see how such ruptures are themselves a stern reminder of our need for new forms of knowledge altogether—forms that reject the assurances of a professionalized architectural discourse, and that call instead for a new horizon of common,...
Keller Easterling

Switch

In the comedy of errors that is US car culture, contradictions and cross-purposes seem to thrive. The mid-twentieth century monovalent highway network replaced a finely grained rail network to conform with default modernist scripts that claim newer is better. In perennial cycles of obsolescence and replacement, new infrastructure technologies have overwritten existing networks, however intelligent or efficient they may be. Adhering to false logics of traffic engineering that linked roadway...
Andreas Angelidakis

Unauthorized

Athens used to be small town. In 1922, following the war the Greeks lost against Turkey, she was asked to take in a large part of the 1.2 million refugees from Asia Minor. The refugees were placed in camps outside the city, which in time grew into suburbs, all named after the places the displaced Greeks left behind: Ionia, Smyrna, and Philadelphia all used to be towns on the coast of Turkey, and in Athens, they were all New. Athens became a city of refugees, and as she struggled to deal with...
Reinhold Martin

Pittsburgh, Paris, Charlottesville: The Infrastructure Question

Consider the following exchange from the infamous press conference conducted by the President of the United States in the lobby of his fading, brassy New York tower on 15 August 2017, three days after the death of Heather Heyer, a peaceful counterprotestor at a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, who was murdered, allegedly, by a Nazi sympathizer: Reporter: Do you think that what you call the alt-left is the same as neo-Nazis? President: All of those...
Michael Sorkin
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