Skyways

"Well, hey, don't worry. You'll get the swing of things in no time," Kate assured him. "Besides, the layer-cake setup makes it easy to figure out what part of town you're in. You've got four levels of skyways, right? Simple: Upper class, upper middle, middle-middle, and lower middle. Then there's the Street, which is your heavy industry, your warehouses, and all the folks who can't afford to live further up. Of course, the Citadel breaks all the rules, but you already knew that."

"Right. So, you're telling me that the Street is all bad news? There are no nice parts of town at ground level?"

"Not except for the Square, which is that big park that the Citadel sits in the middle of. There are some good shops and restaurants for maybe a block around there, but it peters out pretty fast much beyond that. There are some other parks on Street-level that are pretty nice, but you wouldn't want to be there after dark." She smiled. "That isn't to say there aren't nice people on the Street, though. I know a lot of them just in my own apartment building."
Kathryn Kitaen & Michael Perelli in Welcome to the City

Building Up, when Out was Impossible

Faced with limited real estate in the confines of the valley, Metamor City has been forced to build up — and build up it has, to an extent that would be impossible without the use of magic. Most of the residential and commercial zones of the city now sit dozens or hundreds of stories away from ground level. To make it easier to move among this sea of skyscrapers, floating sky-ways crisscross all over the City, providing pathways for skimmers, swoops and pedestrians alike. (Skimmers and swoops can fly freely, but traffic laws restrict them to the skyways and other well-defined flight lanes within the confines of the city.)

There are four main levels of skyways, which roughly correspond to the affluence of the individuals found at those levels of the city. People who live on the Street (i.e., ground level) refer to those from the higher levels as "skywalkers".

The skyways are constructed at intervals of 100 meters above one another, which allows for 23 to 25 storeys on each of the five lower levels of the city (depending how each building's designer divides up the space alotted). Storeys tend to have lower ceilings in the lower levels, which allows the building owners to squeeze in more tenants and thus extract more money from these low-rent areas. The fifth level has some buildings that extend much farther than 100 meters above the last layer of skyways; the occupants of these so-called "emergents" must rely on lifts or airborne vehicles to travel to other parts of the city. Some common examples of emergents include skyports, which can have docking stations for skyships that are more than 200 meters above the fifth skyway; condominiums and penthouses for the extremely wealthy; and the Citadel itself, which at 1500 meters is easily twice the height of any other structure in Metamor City.

Author's Notes

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