COLUMN ONE : L.A.’s Past May Be Part of Its Future : City planners see small-town America as a model for development.

In the midst of the metropolis, main street is making a comeback. As Los Angeles heads for the 21st Century, the city is looking to small-town America as a model of sensible social organization.

From Long Beach to Universal City to the northernmost reaches of Los Angeles County, government planners and private developers are laying the groundwork for a series of enclaves they call “urban villages,” where homes, offices and stores are to be intermingled on the same block or, in some cases, in the same buildings.

The emergence of the urban village, along with the completion of an extensive commuter rail system, is one of the more visible ways in which the region will change between now and the next century. It represents a quest for old-fashioned social order in a place that author Lawrence Durrell once described as “a city with a lack of center, like a head without eyes revolving on a turntable.”

Armed with slides of colonial Williamsburg, antebellum Charleston and late 19th-Century Los Angeles, the designers of urban villages strive to evoke an era when people gathered on front porches at twilight, strolled to the park on Sunday, attended lectures and concerts in nearby town halls, lived over the stores they owned or walked a few blocks to work. Images like these, as foreign as they may seem to life in suburban Southern California, are influencing the design of neighborhoods where thousands of people will live and work by the early years of the next century.

There is more to what is going on than nostalgia, although that is clearly part of the motivation for urban villages. Plans to restore the Santa Monica Pier to its 1920s gaudy grandeur and to resurrect Angel’s Flight, the 320-foot-long railway that lumbered up Bunker Hill at the turn of the century, are further signs of a harried city’s longing for simpler times.

In part, the purpose behind the densely populated urban village is for developers to make maximum use of a shrinking supply of land: Skeptics challenge the whole concept as a development gimmick to squeeze more homes into every cranny of the city.

But there is also a spirit of reform. A sprawling city is trying to coax its residents into closer-knit neighborhoods where people of different races and incomes will live near each other and where the proximity of offices, stores and parks will help discourage the use of automobiles.

The urban village will come in a variety of sizes, from 14 acres in Long Beach to 8,000 acres near Lancaster. Many of them won’t be completely built out by the year 2000, but the outlines of most should be there to see.

Central to many of these developments is a main street lined with shops, restaurants and theaters--in effect, turning the conventional shopping mall inside out and creating an old-fashioned, commercial thoroughfare.

For example, such a main street is to be the principal attraction of a planned commercial/residential development at Universal City, said John Jerde, one of the architects working on the project. According to Jerde, designers at Universal are taking their cue from the layout of Georgetown, Washington’s elegant enclave of townhouses and boutiques.

In Los Angeles, officials are optimistic that the trend toward urban villages will change the profile of the city for the better. “The flat, spread out L.A. will start to look different. It will be more clustered, dense and Eastern in feel,” said Kenneth Topping, director of city planning for Los Angeles.

The groundwork for at least one urban village is being laid in a rural setting about 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

Real estate developer Ray Watt is planning California Springs, a community of 60,000 to 70,000 people on an 8,000-acre stretch of prairie where many people’s notion of high-density living is five acres and a ranchette. Between Lancaster and Gorman, California Springs, planners say, will be reminiscent of early 20th-Century towns laid out in a grid with a main street or town square at the center.

“We’re talking about the kind of place where you could walk virtually anywhere--to school, to market, to a town meeting and where you knew all your neighbors,” said Jean Gath, a consultant to Watt.

Suburban developers don’t all warm to the idea of historical models. “I’m not sure the home buyer out here wants to live in olde town,” said an Upland home builder. But others concede that conventional suburbs may begin to take on some of the characteristics of the urban village as developers are pressured to entice people out of their cars.

“The basic design of the new development will continue to be American suburban,” said Bruce E. Karatz, the president of Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. “But within that context you will see smaller lots, homes closer together, more neighborhood parks and sports facilities and a proliferation of small commercial centers closer to where people live.

“In the next 10 years the distinctions between urban and suburban living will definitely blur,” Karatz said.

Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, says the people who design the urban village should beware of hokeyness.

“There is something about these strategies I find troubling,” Weinstein said. “There is an element of contrivance, as if we’re trying to get people to live in theme parks. I’m still not sure how well the trend is going to go over.”

Other experts argue that even if these experiments in urban living succeed, they won’t check the region’s impulse to sprawl.

“Decentralization will be the dominant mode of development,” said Mark Pisano, director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments. “Beyond the center city, I would see spread-out low-rise as the blueprint for the 1990s.”

It is ironic that a trend toward denser development has any chance of success in an era when no-growth has been the battle cry of innumerable political campaigns. Yet in many neighborhoods where urban villages are being proposed, people react with enthusiasm.

Nowhere has the public’s reception been more surprising than in Playa del Rey. There, a developer’s painstakingly wrought image of an 880-acre seaside town has helped win over a formidable alliance of no-growth groups that had successfully opposed development of the land for 10 years.

Taking over the stalled project last February, Maguire Thomas Partners of Los Angeles assembled a team of nationally prominent architects and planners and radically altered the design of the project, setting out to sell the neighbors on a sort of urban village high concept. Maguire Thomas proposed a residential and commercial enclave that would combine many of the most desirable aspects of small-town America, from New England to the old South to Santa Barbara.

Maguire Thomas made a couple of key compromises with the opponents of development at Playa del Rey. The developers agreed not to build anything in the Ballona Wetlands, a 260-acre wildlife habitat on the property, and they agreed to scale down building height to an average of four stories. But the plans still call for building 5 million square feet of office space, more than 80% of what was so vehemently opposed for a decade.

In Long Beach, another team of developers has gained the public’s backing for a project that people hope will spark some life in the city’s downtown. The project will consist of 11 new buildings, including office towers, condominiums, stores, restaurants and theaters on 14 acres of oceanfront property. One of the developers is James W. Rouse, a pioneer in the design of new towns who is also known for his success in reviving dying downtown neighborhoods in Boston and Baltimore. The main- street motif will figure prominently in the Long Beach project. Buildings will be spaced along a broad pedestrian way that will try to evoke some of the old festiveness of a seaside amusement park that was built on the land in 1901.

Closer to the heart of Los Angeles, a massive complex of skyscrapers, retail businesses, condominiums and apartments--more of a mini-city than an urban village--will begin rising on 300 acres of land west of the Harbor Freeway during the next few years, if all goes as planned.

Two retail corridors, one a walkway, will serve as the axis of this ambitious new community that will be home to as many as 40,000 people and encompass 10 million to 20 million square feet of office space, at least one-fourth the size of the present downtown.

At the same time, there will be plenty of new building in the city that won’t conform to the urban village model. Homes, office buildings and shopping centers will spill across portions of the 56,000-acre Porter Ranch near Chatsworth. An expanded Los Angeles Convention Center, displacing 400 households and 60 businesses, will occupy 26 acres south of downtown. A huge complex of office buildings, apartments and mall enclosed shopping appears destined to dwarf the rustic Farmers Market complex in the city’s Fairfax District.

“City centers” and “urban cores” are the bywords for new commercial developments in Cerritos, Pico Rivera, Norwalk and other low-rise suburbs eager to create a more uptown character.

The region’s commuter rail system is expected to be a catalyst for dense new development along rail corridors and especially at train stations near the city’s downtown. Planning Director Topping said he believes that the stations will foster urban village-style development around Union Station, MacArthur Park and Hollywood during the next decade. By the year 2000, the rail network is likely to extend outward from downtown to Long Beach, the Los Angeles Airport, Hollywood, Santa Barbara, Riverside and San Bernardino.

But officials predict that as the rail system pushes father out it will encourage people to move to the hinterlands and end up causing more expansion of the region’s population.

“In the city, transportation improvements will probably help concentrate development. Elsewhere, rail systems, new HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes will have a scattering effect,” Pisano said.

By the year 2000, the Southern California Assn. of Governments contends, outlying areas, including Riverside, San Bernardino and northern Los Angeles counties, will experience much more growth than the city of Los Angeles, where most of the new urban villages are taking root. According to SCAG, growth in jobs and housing in the city will be moderate, with the greatest gains being made in the San Fernando Valley, where a 27% jump in employment and 20% in housing is projected. In the Central City, however, including Hollywood, the mid-Wilshire District, Watts and downtown Los Angeles, job growth will be less than 10% and housing under 5%.

Meanwhile, SCAG predicts that growth will be astronomical, by comparison, in parts of the Inland Empire and in northern Los Angeles County. In the Antelope Valley alone, job growth is projected to be 265% and housing 138%.

Pisano said that the migration to the east and north will continue to be fueled by an exodus of city dwellers looking for affordable homes in the countryside and willing to travel long distances to work.

Suburban growth is expected to swell the population of the Antelope Valley to more than 500,000 during the next 20 years; create a huge industrial sphere around the Ontario Airport; establish a nearly unbroken corridor of office parks and housing tracts along Interstate 15 from Moreno Valley into northern San Diego County, and push the northern wedge of development to the Kern County line.