The Plan to Swallow Midtown Three landmarks of East Midtown: the MetLife building, Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building. Is New York falling behind Shanghai and Chicago? It will, the Bloomberg administration argues, unless the city replaces aging commercial buildings with giant new office towers in East Midtown - a 73-block area around Grand Central Terminal, up to 57th Street, between Madison and Third Avenues. An ill-conceived rezoning proposal, now wending its way through the approval gantlet, is a parting attempt by the administration to remap this large swath of Manhattan before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's term ends in December. Transit advocates; various elected officials, among them Daniel R. Garodnick, a City Council member from the area; along with design and preservation groups and an alliance of seven community boards, have all raised concerns about the plan. It is awaiting recommendation from the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, before moving toward a City Council vote. Mr. Stringer has an opportunity to make a public-minded stand, as he recently did with Penn Station. What's the problem with the plan? For starters, its priorities are upside down, focusing on buildings, not what's around them. There is too little concern in this proposal for what the architect Robert A. M. Stern has, in an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, rightly called "place-making." New York can surely never win a skyscraper race with Shanghai or Singapore. Its future, including the future of Midtown real estate values, depends on strengthening and expanding what already makes the city a global magnet and model. This means mass transit, pedestrian-friendly streets, social diversity, neighborhoods that don't shut down after 5 p.m., parks and landmarks like Grand Central Terminal and the Chrysler Building. If New York wants to learn from London, Tokyo and Shanghai, the lessons aren't about erecting new skyscrapers. Big cities making gains on New York are investing in rail stations, airports and high-speed trains, while New York rests on the laurels of Grand Central and suffers the 4, 5 and 6 trains, which serve East Midtown. They carry more passengers daily than the entire Washington Metro system. Improving the lives of the 1.3 million people riding those trains would instantly make the city more competitive. Adding thousands of commuters who work in giant new office buildings without upgrading the surrounding streets and subways - the Second Avenue subway won't do it - will only set the city back. New development is of course crucial to the economic future of the city, and will be a boon if it is built around healthy public spaces and thoughtfully integrated with historic preservation. New York isn't Rome; its skyline can evolve and should. Tall buildings belong to the city's DNA. Density is healthy. But the rezoning of East Midtown harks backward, to the era of "Mad Men." The modern work environment is in flux. The flagship company tower is no longer the only corporate model. Businesses are seeking spaces in untraditional neighborhoods with distinctive building stocks, like the Flatiron district, Chelsea and Lower Manhattan, and Dumbo, in Brooklyn. Google chose Chelsea because the district's vibe seemed to match the company's self-image, and many of its employees live within walking distance or a short subway ride away. The administration's rezoning plan imagines Fortune 500 companies demanding millions of square feet for giant new headquarters in glass towers on Park Avenue, as if this were 1965. There may well be some demand for those spaces. But how much demand, without the neighborhood amenities and services that led Google and other companies to look outside Midtown? The Bloomberg administration has certainly not been tone deaf to place-making during the last dozen years, transforming many city parks, waterfronts and plazas, and embracing sustainable design. But its plan for East Midtown fails to recognize a fundamental paradigm shift. The focus in designing cities has now turned from buildings to the spaces between those buildings - sidewalks, plazas, parks - whose disposition requires planning. The Bloomberg administration has focused on zoning, which is a blunt instrument for organizing a city. It is not planning. This proposal envisions developers of the biggest buildings contributing to a fund for vague, as-yet-undetermined improvements to subway stations and other public spaces. The fund is a variation on an old, failed city policy: hinging prospective, unsecured benefits on the actions of private developers, which, as often as not, fail to pay off. The fear that these new towers might overwhelm beloved monuments like Grand Central or the Chrysler Building is addressed by Bloomberg officials with a wink and nod: given the other obstacles to new construction, only a few big buildings will realistically be built during the next decade, should the rezoning plan go through. Which means, then, that the fund is a ruse. A couple of extra-big buildings won't throw off nearly enough money for the necessary improvements that the city argues are the payoff for approving the plan in the first place.