EDITORIAL DENSITY'S CHILD MAKING THE MOST OF LOS ANGELES SPRAWL.

PUT the NIMBYs, anti-sprawl lobby and champions of wide open spaces at all costs among the ranks of the flat-Earth types.

It's too late to stop densification in Southern California, for it's already happened.

A study led by noted planning expert William Fulton of Ventura for the Brookings Institution found that the Greater L.A. area has an even higher density of population than the New York metropolitan area. It is second only to Honolulu in what Fulton calls ``dense sprawl.''

In the years ahead, the sprawl will become even denser and farther reaching. For L.A., Ventura, San Bernardino, Orange and Riverside counties - density is our destiny.

That's not all bad news.

If there's a lesson to be learned in the region's last half-century of explosive growth, it's that there's good sprawl and bad. The challenge for Greater Los Angeles is to ensure that new developments are well-designed - and to correct the planning mistakes of the past.

Good sprawl can be seen in many of the region's newest land developments - massive, but self-contained communities. They use limited space wisely, with zero-lot lines and two-story structures, while leaving plenty of open spaces in the outlying areas.

More importantly, they are self-sufficient. They contain schools, community centers, internal transportation systems, and ample commercial and business areas to meet shopping and employment needs. Residents need not leave the community - and clog the freeways - to buy groceries or get to work.

Such developments are dense, but comfortable. They provide a good quality of urban life, and they lay the foundation for strong neighborhoods and communities.

They're worlds apart from the bad sort of sprawl that has consumed much of L.A. over the past several decades: crammed apartment complexes or housing developments and gigantic retail outlets that are built with little thought for community or quality-of-life concerns.

Poorly planned sprawl overwhelms public resources and is a blight on the regional landscape.

The continued expansion and densification of metropolitan L.A. should put to rest once and for all the spokes-on-the-wheel mentality of city planners who think all of L.A. should flow in and out of downtown. L.A. never has and never will be that sort of metropolis - it's a loose confederation of smaller, well-defined communities in urban hubs.

And it needs to be run that way.

When it comes to urban planning, local leaders should make quality of life - not placating the whims of developers or raising sales tax revenue - their top priority. In local government, authority must reside in smaller communities and neighborhood councils, which deserve the most say in their own future.

The key for L.A. leaders is to make '`dense sprawl'' work - to use land in a way that's efficient, but not destructive, and creates sustainable communities.

It's a choice between making L.A. the city of the future - or a ghetto of the past.