PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN RENEWAL : A Concert Hall for Fantasyland : Recession and riots underline the perversity of this cultural extravagance as a statement of civic pride.

Ground was broken recently for the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which--based on a heralded design process and resulting fanciful plans--is being acclaimed as a bold attempt to create an idiosyncratic architectural icon.

In this respect, the concept is not unlike the spirit that spurred the construction of the Sydney Opera House, which opened 20 years ago to mark the emergence of that Australian city. In Los Angeles, the hope is that the Disney Hall might help revive a fractured and bruised downtown, and in time bring honor and glory to the city.

Indeed, the projects also share a similar stylistic fondness for curves: the opera house designed by architect Jorn Utzon as a clipper ship in full bellowing sail gracing a stunning waterfront and the Disney Hall fashioned by Frank Gehry as a sculptured exotic flower set among the hard edges of the Modernist and civic indulgences of Bunker Hill.

But beyond the celebratory sculpture/design of the Disney Hall is the question of how appropriate is the timing and tenor of the $221-million project. That figure includes $111 million for the 2,380-seat hall, planned to be funded mainly by gifts from the Disney family, and $110 million for a complementary 2,500-car underground garage, to be paid for by the county through a convoluted public bond issue.

And those are only estimates. No one really knows what the final bill will be, or how much in scarce public subsidies and private funds will be needed to maintain and operate such a cultural conceit. For the much more ambitious Sydney project, which included a concert hall, theater and recording studios as well as an opera house, the price tag rose during construction from $7 million to $102 million. It was eventually paid for in large part by a national lottery hawked by schoolchildren.

To be sure, the Disney project seemed almost reasonable when it was announced five years ago, with a price tag of $50 million for concert hall and chamber music halls. The need for parking was noted, but not detailed or estimated. No matter. Those were magnanimous times. Los Angeles was on a rising tide of commercial construction, expanding public budgets and generous corporate and private donations. Cultural pretensions and indulgences such as the Disney Hall were affordable.

That, without question, is not the case today. The nagging recession, a floundering real estate market and disastrous public deficits, rubbed raw by the riots of last spring, have the city reeling. Resources of every type are needed.

But if our sad history of what passes for city planning and urban renewal has taught us anything, these resources should not be focused downtown and certainly not in such a grand gesture as the Disney Hall and at such a staggering cost--no matter who is paying the bills.

Yes, the Disney Hall construction will create jobs: approximately 780, according to a Music Center press release. But those jobs and many more could more easily be generated by diverting the money into an ambitious community cultural center program, in new and recycled buildings, preferably as prideful anchors in riot-savaged shopping centers. There is where music and hope are needed. Of course, those who were to be inspired by the Disney Hall would be invited.

If Los Angeles is to be revived, the effort is not going to start downtown, and certainly not in the form of a fanciful concert hall. Rather, it will begin in our scattered neighborhoods in need. The centrist trickle-down theory doesn’t work, in urban design and renewal or in economics.

There is little argument that if built, the Disney Hall will become an architectural landmark, to lend pride, if not cultural notoriety, to the city. This has been used to rationalize all sorts of projects, from the great cathedrals of medieval Europe to the Sydney Opera House. When such landmarks are viewed today, there is little thought of what perversion of priorities there might have been at the time of construction; whether the cost of, say, a cathedral should have been diverted instead to needed housing.

But we do not live in the future. We live in the present, and beyond temporal design theories, there seems something perverse about spending so much money on a singular concert hall when our streets echo with a dirge.