ABSTRACT
Bloomberg's unusual administration opens an important debate on how to accommodate private property interests by mitigating their impact on the community in the long term, and allowing them to become great sources of economic support for public investment. Tax contributions of the city's most high-profile developments such as in the case of Columbus Circle, which many have actively fought against, as it threatened to cast shadows over Central Park, is instead an example of real contributors to the emerging public space and a product of an administrative mechanism known as “air rights.” In New York City, the so-called “air rights” allows a property owner who has built below what the regulations establish to “transfer” that surplus building capacity to others. What at first sight seems a simple operation, the purchase and sale of air, is actually an opaque and controversial process, at the time that its excessive use threatens the quality of the future of the city's public space.
