Disney’s Vision Transcends Park Borders : Expansion: The entertainment giant wants a city-sponsored ‘garden district’ around its new project, perhaps changing the face of surrounding Anaheim.

You can color Disneyland’s expansion plan green.

Not only does it symbolize the greenbacks that the Burbank-based entertainment giant wants to generate with the $3-billion proposal for a new resort complex, but it also characterizes Walt Disney Co.’s plan to transform the entire area around the theme park into a “commercial recreation area” with a so-called “garden district.”

At the heart of the district would be Westcot Center, a new “global village” dominated by a giant, futuristic sphere elevated above a lake and inspired by Epcot, a Disney attraction in Florida.

But Disney’s plan goes far beyond new attractions reserved for ticket-holders and creates new spaces and re-creates old ones that would be open to everyone.

If Disney builds the Anaheim project, West and Walnut streets, Harbor Boulevard and Katella Avenue would all become wide, tree-lined avenues bedecked with festive banners--odes to the outdoor, pedestrian-oriented areas found in Europe. The company calls them “streetscapes.”

Proposed “people-movers,” moving sidewalks and elevated walkways, would act to get people out of their cars in a hurry and into new, pedestrian plazas lush with greenery, fountains and reflecting pools.

The garish, Las Vegas-style neon hotel, restaurant and car-rental agency signs now dominating the streets near Disneyland would be pulled down, to be replaced by smaller, low-to-the-ground, monument-style signs. Imagine, Disney says, the hum of electric power lines replaced by bird songs and the chatter of shoppers.

All in all, Disney’s designs could dramatically change the face of Anaheim, as the company did when it opened the park in 1955. Just how big the change could be depends on whether the city extends these concepts beyond Disney’s property to the entire area, and if it finds the money to pay for it.

Planning professionals view the pedestrian centers, the people mover and lots of green, open spaces--all of which will be open to the public, not just ticket holders--as a model of advanced urban design.

The “garden district” concept expands on the notion that neighborhoods can, in effect, be theme parks by customizing the look and the feel and laying out the “attractions” or amenities on a broad canvas of land or a chunk of city blocks. Orange County developers have used the theme park metaphor in planned communities such as Woodbridge in Irvine and Rancho Santa Margarita, where the placement of every building and amenity fits a scheme and is dominated by an architectural style or geographical feature, such as a man-made lake or picturesque mountainside.

But urban planners caution that Disneyland’s efforts cannot be duplicated by cities because a visitor’s total experience is controlled by the company from the point of arrival, and most of the county’s older cities can’t operate the same way economically or politically.

“There are lessons to be learned from what Disney does,” said Frank Hotchkiss, a planner and architect with the Planning Center, a Newport Beach firm. “But as far as transferability to other parts of the urban texture, it would be frightening to think of our cities as being that controlled an environment as Disneyland is.”

Hotchkiss said he is impressed with the urban design elements in Disney’s proposals, especially the gardens and the pedestrian-oriented environments. But as a futurist he would like to see more mass transit in Disney’s plans, a sentiment echoed by a half-dozen urban designers.

Irvine architect John Graves added that since Disney is proposing three huge parking garages, with a combined 28,000 spaces, the company should make sure that they are landscaped properly and used for a variety of purposes.

Besides greening up the garages with plants and trees, Graves said, the company and the city should cooperate perhaps in using one of the garages as a park-and-ride facility to feed the city’s own people mover-system or other mass-transit vehicles to other destinations.

“Disneyland represents a model of urban design where you’re into a very nice environment once you’re inside the gate,” added David Baab, an Irvine architect who once worked as a student intern for Disney in Florida. “But now with this new plan, there’s an opportunity to connect more to what’s around it. By having an irregular perimeter, you can knit the new Disneyland with the surrounding community easier. . . . It could be a new model for urban design on-site, and it can be sympathetic to what’s around it.”

Baab said Disney should make sure that its expansion project is somehow linked to the proposed six-city light-rail line envisioned from Irvine to Fullerton through Anaheim. And he wonders why there could not be remote sites for gathering Disneyland-bound travelers, in cities such as Irvine, and then transporting them to the new Disney resort center via train, monorail or other forms of mass transit. “Why not have a special Disney train? Make an event out of it,” Baab said.

Disney cannot afford to build a new monorail, company officials said, citing construction costs of $50 million per mile. But they said they would be happy to link their project to other rail systems.

Baab, among several other urban design experts, sees a major challenge for Anaheim in extending the “streetscapes” into surrounding neighborhoods.

“Where the city comes in is they should carry that out into the commercial streets that adjoin Disneyland so that Disneyland is kind of woven into the fabric of the whole city,” Baab said.

“The garden district idea is really a tree-planting program,” said architect and planner Ron Baers of John L. Chapman Land Planning in Newport Beach.

As part of its plan, Disney would realign West Street to curve around a green water oasis in front of its new hotel complex. And Katella Avenue, one of the county’s busiest streets, would be changed slightly to have more trees and a fountain plaza in front of the Convention Center.

Most observers predicted that Disney will get what it wants in the way of such “streetscapes.”

“It’s a company town,” Baers said of Anaheim.

Anaheim Councilman Tom Daly said the city has already started to place utilities underground and rid the area of garish signs.

“The announcement of Disney’s plans will probably lead us to move faster on such things as the sign cleanup,” said Daly, a staff member for the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County. “This is a great opportunity to now address some of the problems head-on and fix them, such as the shortage of open space in the neighborhood. . . . “

Daly denied that previous city councils created the blight with poor planning.

“It was simply the nature of explosive growth during the ‘50s and ‘60s,” he said. “Planning was not one of the city’s strong suits then. But there was no precedent before Disneyland.”