SOUTHLAND MUST GET PAST FALSE DILEMMAS LEADERS SHOULD FIND WAYS TO MAKE BOTH ECOSYSTEM, CARS COMPATIBLE.

Byline: William Fulton Local View

ALL across Southern California, civic and political leaders are currently engaged in a wide-ranging effort to envision the future of the region.

Compass, sponsored by the Southern California Association of Governments, is a noble effort to help us face up to the reality of future growth by asking a fundamental question: Where?

In a series of workshops around the region, these civic and political leaders are sitting at large maps and game boards with a set of chits representing the additional 6 million new residents in the next 20 years.

They're being asked to lay those chits down where they think growth should go, in an attempt to reach some rudimentary consensus about how to handle future growth.

The Compass exercise is valuable as far as it goes. But as Southern California faces the future, the question is not just where growth goes, but what it looks like.

Simply rearranging traditional subdivisions - or making them a little denser by making lots a little smaller - isn't enough.

For the region to be both livable and equitable, we must dig deeper for urban solutions.

That's because a new reality is emerging in metropolitan Los Angeles. It is not Philadelphia or Boston or Chicago - metropolitan areas characterized by stagnating population and deep chasms between the central city and the suburbs.

And it is not the Los Angeles of the 1960s or '70s, sprawling ever-outward toward prosperity if not sustainability.

Rather, it is a very particular kind of 21st century metropolis - one that is likely the model for other cities in the West and Southwest in the decades to come.

As an urban space, it is low-rise, yet dense. The population and the economy are growing, yet becoming more diverse at the same time - encompassing a wide range of people and activities and characterized by extremes between rich and poor.

As an ecosystem, it is extremely fragile, short on water, land and other basic resources. And as a political landscape, it is fragmented and often dysfunctional.

A set of reports just released by the University of Southern California argue that this new reality requires a new agenda - one that acknowledges that Los Angeles is a different kind of urban place and one that promotes unconventional urban solutions.

In particular, ``After Sprawl: Action Plans for Metropolitan Los Angeles,'' with a companion volume of more detailed reports, suggests that a new agenda must get past the either-or approach to traditional urban planning: economic growth or economic equity, incarceration or rehabilitation, cars or trains.

Rather, we must weave existing realities together with innovative new approaches.

And as we approach the future of the region, we must be creative in thinking about those two undeniably realities or our region: the car and the ecosystem.

Traditionally, urban planners have sought to use urban policy to get people out of their cars, apparently with the goal of eliminating cars altogether. Especially in Southern California, this is impossible. Most people will always drive most places. Indeed, the car will sometimes be required to achieve noble goals, such as connecting people of modest means to better job opportunities.

In the emerging reality of Southern California, we should neither surrender to the car nor engage in a futile attempt to eliminate it.

Rather, our goal should be to manage it to benefit the region as a whole. In some cases, this will mean discouraging dependence on the car by enhancing our public transit system. In other cases, it may mean encouraging shorter car trips by building more housing in existing urban areas and less housing on the metropolitan fringe.

And in still other cases, it will mean actually encouraging people of modest means to use cars to connect themselves to economic opportunities - perhaps through innovative means such as car-sharing.

The flip side of the car is the ecosystem - the corridors of nature that traverse the metropolis via watercourses, wildlife corridors and other nonhuman networks.

As with the car, the battle over the ecosystem in Southern California has been viewed as an either-or situation. Either natural systems are completely preserved, or they are paved over for new development.

But this too is a false choice.

We can restore the health of our natural systems - and improve life for people as well - by making new development more environmentally sensitive and especially by retrofitting older urban neighborhoods so that nature can thrive once more.

By using more permeable surfaces, for example, we can lessen the environmental impact of our relentless human activity. And by restoring rivers and watercourses throughout the region, we can improve water quality and enhance the daily lives of millions of residents - especially in modest communities, which are often located in the lowlands.

Where new growth goes is very important. But as ``After Sprawl'' - found online at http://urban.usc.edu/aftersprawl/ - makes clear, what it looks like and how it is shaped is just as important.

The emerging realities of Southern California require us to approach urban growth and urban policy in general not as a win-lose proposition, but as an evolving tapestry in which our human activities - social, cultural, economic - are woven together with our regional ecosystem in ways that allow both sides to win.