Terreform is a non-profit 501(c)(3), urban research studio and advocacy group founded in 2005 by Michael Sorkin. Its mission is to investigate the forms and practices that will yield equitable, sustainable, and beautiful cities for our urbanizing planet. Supported by donations and volunteers (including the staff of the Michael Sorkin Studio, which provides its expertise in design and analysis pro bono), Terreform works as a “friend of the court,” dedicated to raising urban expectations and to disseminating innovative and progressive ideas as widely as possible. Terreform undertakes self-initiated investigations into both local and global issues and we make ourselves available to community and other organizations to support independent environmental and planning initiatives.

New York City (Steady) State, our on-going research project, is a comprehensive investigation into urban self-sufficiency. While focused on New York, it is intended to raise issues and propose solutions for cities around the world that seek to take radical measures to secure their respiration and to achieve a more sustainably democratic polity, founded in the local. This research was featured in the United States Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale. In addition to New York City (Steady) State, we also host a series of current and past projects, which include speculations on sites in such vexed environments as Gaza, post- Katrina New Orleans, post-Sandy New York, and a new technopole in the Ecuadorean highlands. In 2014, Terreform launched its publishing imprint, UR (urban research). UR is intended both as a medium for disseminating our own work and as a support structure for designers and researchers who share the project of a progressive and liberated urbanism.

Terreform gained public attention and critical acclaim in 2006 with Project Loisada 2106, a proposal for the History Channel’s City of the Future competition. With a scheme imagining a post-automotive New York, Project Loisada won the competition’s Infiniti Award. Project Loisada, like many of Terreform’s projects, focused on New York City, our home and primary field of speculation. Our work has included an investigation of a post-automotive lower Manhattan, a study of the implications of the Columbia University expansion in Manhattanville, as well as our major on-going project – New York City (Steady) State, a comprehensive investigation into urban self-sufficiency which, while centered on New York is intended to raise issues and propose solutions for cities around the world that seek to take radical measures to secure their respiration and to achieve a more sustainably democratic polity, founded in the local.

Featured in the United States pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale, New York City (Steady) State explores the morphologies and technologies that might enable a completely autonomous New York City. We mean this definitively: Terreform has been investigating the possibility of the city’s ecological footprint becoming fully co-terminus with its political boundaries. This fantasy of autarky opens up an exploration of the wide range of combinations of environmental, architectural, and social conditions that support urban respiration. The first volume of the study – devoted to food – is near completion and volumes on waste, air, water, and climate, and movement systems, are underway. Our goal is not simply to test the marginal possibility of complete urban self-responsibility but also to compile an encyclopedia of forms and technologies to help bring cities around the world closer to harmonizing their demands with the bearing capacity of the earth.