A collection of elephantine volumes, each six times the height and width of an ordinary book, gathers dust in a corner of The Riverdale Press office. They contain Mayor John V. Lindsay's master plan for New York City's future.

The film of dust on those books dims the ambition and idealism that once shone from their contents. What happened? "We all failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is," Lindsay budget aide Peter Goldmark told Vincent J. Cannato, author of The Ungovernable City, a biography of Lindsay.

Now another mayor has put forward a comprehensive plan for the city's future. Best known for its call to institute congestion pricing - a toll on cars driving into Manhattan - Mayor Michael Bloomberg's PlaNYC also calls for massive new residential and commercial development to accommodate what City Hall believes will be a million new New Yorkers arriving in the next 25 years, and for new parks and mass transit to serve them. And it bills itself as a green plan that will reduce energy consumption, improve air and water quality and reduce global warming emissions by 30 percent.

Yet in planning for the New Yorkers to come, PlaNYC hasn't enlisted or considered the New Yorkers of the present.

Like Lindsay's planners, they have failed to come to grips with what a neighborhood is.

Despite the plan's ambitious scope, when an all-star cast of elected officials, community activists and academic planners took the stage at Cooper Union's Great Hall during an all-day symposium on PlaNYC, much of the discussion was about what isn't in the plan.

PlaNYC's chief architect Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff and his minions "didn't look at the needs and aspirations of people who now live in neighborhoods," said Tom Angotti, director of the Hunter College Center for Community Planning and Development. Their way of asking for feedback amounted to saying, "Give me your ideas and we'll decide if they're good," he continued.