Making Midtown: A New Vision for a 21st Century Garment District in New York City provides a roadmap for revitalizing the Garment District with fashion design and manufacturing at its core. The recommendations outlined in this publication establish a model for New York and other cities to create a new kind of urban creative district – one that leverages, rather than replaces, a given neighborhood's existing resources to create real estate value, support jobs, and capture a distinct neighborhood identity and character.

The report presents the first unified vision for the future of the Garment District in an effort to keep NYC competitive with other fashion capitals such as Paris, London, and Milan. Making Midtown: A New Vision for a 21st Century Garment District in New York City calls for unlocking the neighborhood’s real estate value—an incremental annual economic impact of $340 million—while sustaining the manufacturing infrastructure that is the linchpin of New York’s fashion industry and this creative district. The plan, the first to be based on real estate and labor market data, has resulted from a stakeholder-driven planning process.

Making Midtown publication synthesizes more than three years of work which documented the Garment District's built environment, real estate dynamics, and fashion industry activities; engaged scores of Garment District stakeholders to identify priorities and build consensus around shared goals; and developed a new model for integrating manufacturing into a densely developed, mixed-use creative district.

The team of Fellows – including architects, urban designers and economic development consultants – developed the final recommendations in three key areas:

1. Promote locally designed and produced clothes
   
2. Improve the Garment District's public realm
   
3. Sustain a diverse mix of uses in the District, including garment district manufacturing