Lucas Almássy
This fictitious letter imagines a future civic demand: that public life in the city should not be confined to the ground. It does not argue simply for more parks, plazas, or open space. The deeper problem is that buildings themselves rarely contain elevated infrastructure for the public. The city rises, but the public stays below. This letter proposes a future in which the airspace above and between existing buildings is three-dimensionally composed and reserved for shared civic terrain by architects, landscape architects, and urban planners.
May 8th, 2026
A Letter to Congress,
We reject the idea that buildings should remain autonomous private objects, standing beside one another as isolated commodities. Buildings must be understood as participants in a larger civic infrastructure.
We, the undersigned, advocate for the development of federal rights regarding the expansion of public infrastructure over the next century. The city has grown vertically, but public life has not.
Cities are failing us. The public is left to move through the city at street level, between the walls of corporate development, looking upward at spaces it cannot enter.
We call for new city planning regulations and zoning frameworks for three-dimensional public access. We maintain that cities can no longer regulate land as a flat surface on the ground, instead cities must be understood as volumes of collective life.
We call for regulations requiring large buildings and major developments over three stories to provide civic infrastructure above the ground floor: public terraces, accessible roofs, elevated walkways, bridges between buildings, interior public passages, suspended gardens, viewing platforms, shaded upper-level rooms, and routes that allow citizens to move through the city in section, not only in plan.
Beginning in 2028, all new urban developments in American cities between three and six stories will be required to contribute to public life beyond the ground plane. Each qualifying development should provide a publicly accessible elevated or semi-elevated space with a protected viewshed, ensuring that access to light, air, horizon, and collective gathering is treated as a civic right rather than a private amenity.
These new accesses shall not be hindered or controlled by private investment in any way. The airspace zoning shall be freely accessible to the public regardless of race, class, nationality, or time of day.
The future city shall not force all public life into streets and parks while reserving height for private capital. The future city shall create an elevated public world: a shared topography of roofs, bridges, balconies, ramps, gardens, platforms. The right to the city must include the right to ascend within it.
By 2050, cities should establish district-wide public airspace requirements, reserving civic volumes above and between buildings for shared use. As a baseline, each qualifying development district should dedicate an accessible public airspace volume roughly equivalent to half a football field in area and forty feet in height. New construction should be planned to connect to, support, and expand this elevated public realm over time, creating a continuous three-dimensional network of terraces, bridges, gardens, platforms, and civic rooms within the city.
New developments above a certain scale will be required to contribute to an elevated public network, existing buildings should be studied for retrofitting opportunities, and all roofs should be evaluated as potential civic surfaces.
This is a democratic-socialist demand in spatial terms: that the vertical wealth of the city be redistributed into collective use. The air above the city shall not be split and kept for the whims of cooperate interests.
We imagine a future in which one can walk not only along the street, but through the upper levels of buildings; not only around private towers, but between them; not only beneath the skyline, but within it. We imagine a city where citizens can rise from the sidewalk into public rooms, gardens, terraces, bridges, and platforms woven through the architecture itself.
The future city cannot remain a canyon of private capital with public life compressed at the bottom. It must become a civic section: layered, connected, accessible, and shared. Its buildings must no longer rise only as instruments of profit, but as frameworks for collective life.
We call for a new urban contract: one that recognizes the public’s right not only to occupy the city, but to ascend within it. The American city must rise not only for investment, but for dignity, health, equality, movement, and shared experience.