At an urban-planning conference last week, Mary Ann Tighe, a prominent commercial real estate broker and glamorous presence in any room full of people who think about sewage flow, aligned herself against a certain strain of traditionalism. The most powerful woman in New York, according to a recent ranking by the business publisher Crain’s New York, Ms. Tighe lamented returning home from China to a skyline she now views only in the quaintest terms.

“I always think to myself, what a romantic 20th-century city,” Ms. Tighe told the audience. Implicit in her comment is the notion that to compete with Guangzhou we must look like Guangzhou. I suspect that this is a woman who doesn’t watch “Annie Hall” and get wistful.

Positioning New York for 21st-century global supremacy has been a preoccupation of the Bloomberg administration, and one central to the mayor’s vision of greatly expanding the technology sector by ratcheting up elite science education. The city is reviewing seven proposals from 17 universities and research institutions (Stanford and Cornell are among those that have forged alliances) bidding to create an applied sciences and engineering campus here — one that could spring up on Roosevelt Island or at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, among other potential locations. The city is offering land and up to $100 million in capital to achieve all this.

It is also providing us with an invitation to imagine what New York would look and feel like as a kind of mid-Atlantic Silicon Valley. Is it even possible to mastermind such a world?