PLANNERS ENVISION VAN NUYS `VILLAGE'.

Byline: Tony Knight Daily News Staff Writer

It's Friday evening and the new plaza mercado at the Civic Center is bustling. Strains of mariachi music waft from an outdoor restaurant as shoppers at the open-air farmers market browse through aisles of fruit and produce.

Couples with kids in strollers stroll past fountains and sculptures on the broad plaza in the shadow of the gleaming new City Hall building. They gather at the nearby coffee shops and bookstores.

The newly widened and landscaped sidewalks of Van Nuys Boulevard are crowded with pedestrians window-shopping on what has become one of the Valley's premiere retail and entertainment destinations. They cross the newly narrowed boulevard between slow-moving cars and the new jitneys that serve the area.

At closing time, clerks and restaurant employees can be seen walking back into the neighborhoods a few blocks to their new apartment buildings. Many shoppers take the same routes. Other shoppers return to well-lighted nearby parking lots to retrieve cars for the ride home. Others wait on the boulevard for buses that will take them to urban villages elsewhere in the Valley.

This is a vision of what Van Nuys could be - a new urban environment that creates a village atmosphere and a sense of place that attracts people.

To many Valley community leaders, the revival of Van Nuys in the heart of the Valley is the single most important development that must take place for long-term demographic changes to stabilize and for the Valley to maintain its strong middle-class homeowner base.

Because Van Nuys is split up among five City Council districts, they say, it has been neglected. Reviving it depends on either City Hall recognizing the importance of Van Nuys and dealing with its problems or the Valley becoming its own city with Van Nuys as its civic center, they say.

``We think it's so important that Van Nuys is a shining part of the San Fernando Valley,'' said Wendy Brogin, vice president and chief accounting officer of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley.

``It's a place that has been established as a government center. It is centrally located to a good part of the East Valley. And it has a history outside the Valley. People know of Van Nuys from the glory days.''

Livable communities

The vision of a revived Van Nuys is based on so-called ``livable communities,'' a vogue idea among urban redevelopers. With the recession fading away, developers and urban planners say the pent-up demand for such places is enormous, pointing to the successes of Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade and Old Pasadena.

``For the decades that the Valley was growing there was always another development over the next hill,'' said city Planning Director Con Howe. ``That's all over and now the new development is going to be in-fill in existing urban areas.''

Capital is being attracted to the revival of compact older town centers that had fallen on hard times in the 1970s and '80s with the rising success of the big malls.

These new urban landscapes are built to a human scale, encourage pedestrians and discourage cars. They provide a safe meeting place for shoppers and families - and a sense of community and ``place'' for Angelenos who yearn to escape from the alienating anonymity of a drive-thru culture.

While Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade and Old Pasadena are the prime examples, livable streets have been developed successfully in Santa Ana, Monrovia, along Whittier Boulevard in the unincorporated county area, Redlands and Cathedral City.

Valley villages

Urban planners involved in this revival say the Valley communities of Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Reseda and Canoga Park are perfect templates for the development of ``urban villages.''

``Van Nuys is a beauty spot with the greatest retail in the world compared to what Monrovia used to be like,'' said Michael A. Kreski, senior associate with Gensler Urban Designers, who are working on the Van Nuys Civic Center project.

``It was a grass-roots effort; they really have turned (Monrovia) around. Retail is thriving. People go there rather than trying to get away form it,'' he said.

All these areas have compact commercial cores, a reservoir of city-owned parking, a grid of streets and alleys, and the ability to accept higher density in both commercial and residential units.

``They're the way to anchor the slide of some of the Valley's residential neighborhoods by restoring a sense of place,'' said former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole, who was instrumental in Old Pasadena's revival. ``There's a synergy. The commercial areas help the residential areas and the residential areas help the commercial.''

The key to starting such an area is safe and affordable parking and theaters, urban planners said.

``What you do is you draw a line around three blocks and you say, `How many square feet of retail do we have? How many parking spaces do we have?' and you put them together,'' Cole said.

``So instead of having parking for Joe's Microbrewery, you have parking for the district and it's clean, affordable, safe and well-lighted.''

Cole now directs the Southern California office of the Local Government Commission, a pressure group of urban planners, architects and city officials that have launched a major initiative to encourage urban redevelopment into ``livable communities.''

In partnership with the Southern California Association of Governments last year, they launched what is being called ``the broadest and most ambitious planning education effort ever undertaken in Southern California.''

Its objective is to channel new development as the region's economy heats up into renewing older urban areas with a mix of residential and commercial that creates a village atmosphere.

``Our older suburbs are a valuable resource and you can't have a vital regional economy if you don't invest in places that are in decline,'' said Joseph Carreras, manager of SCAG's livable places initiative.

Ultimately, it is hoped these villages will attract a higher density of residential uses, reducing automobile trips because residents tend to shop and play within walking distance.

The Van Nuys Civic Center may be the first place in the Valley to attract such urban redevelopment. City officials are hoping to get the ball rolling with the $35 million city office buildings that will include 10,000 square feet of retail space and a 35,000-square-foot open air plaza.

The project is being planned by the city in partnership with the Voit Co., which developed much of the high-rise office space in Warner Center. Designers and planners are in the early stages of creating a plan for the building on the southeast corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Sylvan Street.

``Big civic buildings tend to be anonymous, but this is going to be really designed to express the commitment to the community,'' said Kreski. ``You throw one catalytic element in it, you plant one seed, and once that grows things start to grow around it.''

At a recent Van Nuys community meeting on the project, Kreski showed slides of the central plaza at Vera Cruz, Mexico, and other public places from Europe and Canada as examples of what could be built in the Civic Center.

``You have to feel like the place belongs to you,'' Kreski told the audience. ``You've got a heart to this thing and the heart is open space. But it's a space that will be used.''

Alienating L.A.

Southern California consumers are so hungry for these types of places because there are so few of them, urban planners said. The reason is that the region urbanized to the scale of the automobile, with wide boulevards, single-family homes and long commercial corridors.

The problem with such development patterns is that they tend to be alienating and unfriendly and major portions of the corridors fall into decay because there isn't enough commerce to support so much retail space.

``When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose places to be,'' said Cole. ``You can't create a village atmosphere along 9 miles unless you've got New York-level densities.''

The result has been a Los Angeles of neatly maintained single family neighborhoods laced with miles and miles of decaying commercial corridors.

``Los Angeles has some wonderful places,'' Cole said. ``We're known around the world for Dodger Stadium, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, Rodeo Drive, Olvera Street.

``We take it for granted that in order to get to them we'll drive six-lane ugly arterials with ugly signs, streets lights that were designed for Godzilla, not for human beings, places that are impossible to walk, hot and ugly in summer and wet in winter.

``And then we wonder why some places like Canoga Park or Van Nuys aren't places people are proud to call home.''

At a recent workshop in Manhattan Beach sponsored by the Local Government Commission, designers and traffic consultants explained the livable communities approach. The idea is to target a compact three or four-block area in which to widen the sidewalks, aggregate the parking spaces, and squeeze the wide boulevards.

Showing slides of livable communities in Vancouver and Toronto in Canada and Portland, Ore., traffic engineer Michael Bates told the planners, engineers and elected officials that experience shows a wide arterial like Van Nuys boulevard can be narrowed and still handle nearly all the 42,000 daily vehicle trips it now has.

``You can handle a lot of traffic and still have a livable environment on the street,'' Bates said.

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3 Photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) Making it work

Pedestrians strolling on revitalized Fourth Street in Santa Ana enjoy the broad brick sidewalks and clean environment that urban planners emphasize for developing ``livable communities.''

(2) Fourth Street in Santa Ana features clutter-free sidewalks with shady trees for comfort.

John McCoy/Daily News

(3) Adriana Noonan and Don Schultz encounter many illegal sidewalk signs in Van Nuys.

John McCoy/Daily News