Check Out the Secret New Urban Vision for NYC

Streetsblog has come up with the urban planning scoop of the week, making available a report prepared by Alex Garvin & Associates that has helped Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff develop the new urban planning vision for the city as discussed this week in the Observer. The paper compared the ambition and scope of the plan to the 1811 layout of Manhattan's street grid system and the 1929 Regional Plan that led to some of today's parks and highways. (And now, we know for sure what the city's Make No Small Plans Deputy Mayor has been focusing some of his attention on since the 2012 Olympics bid and all its related mega-developments didn't cut the mustard with the IOC last year.)

The Garvin firm was the lead planner for...the NYC 2012 Olympics bid. Says Streetsblog:

Streetsblog was given a copy of the Garvin Report by a City Hall insider in June. Not wanting to jeopardize the potential for this innovative plan to move forward, we held off on writing about it. But with the Mayor's long-awaited speech on land use and transportation four months late and postponed indefinitely, with transportation and public space issues nowhere near the top of the Bloomberg Administration's second term agenda, and with the story out in today's Observer, there doesn't seem to be any point in continuing to hold this.

The upshot, as reported on Curbed earlier today, is that Streetsblog scanned the entire 91-page document, converted it to PDF and is making it available on their site. (The full PDF is available by clicking on this link, but PLEASE NOTE, if you click, you're going to downloading a 6.5M document. Or you can go to Streetsblog and download the whole document or individual chapters)

Streetsblog does add that they have no idea if the report has influenced any real city policy.

One particularly interesting part of the report is the segment that targets the Sunnyside Railyards in Queens as "the city's single greatest opportunity to increase the housing supply and simultaneously improve the quality of the public realm."

We always suspected that Queens was going to be the new Brooklyn. Or, is it the Bronx?