Planners Look to the Past in Revising Blueprint for L.A.’s Future : Growth: Proposal aims to return to urban designs of pre-automotive era and seeks to make density attractive.

In a vast city divided by mountain ranges and freeways--not to mention income, class and ethnic suspicion--a small group of urban planners is working toward an ambitious and elusive goal: deciding how the West’s largest city should look, feel and act in the next century.

As this Planning Department team writes the first major revision of Los Angeles’ blueprint for growth in nearly two decades, it faces two challenges: It must rid itself of the things that make the City of Angels hellish--outrageous home prices, excruciating commutes and ghettoized neighborhoods--as it tries to preserve what makes Los Angeles desirable--open spaces, an unmatched mix of cultures and attractive single-family neighborhoods.

The plan, which is one-quarter complete, aims to spread the benefits and burdens of new development evenly across the city through zoning laws. But it also aims to change the way Angelenos think about themselves and their communities, to encourage people from one neighborhood to care about what happens to residents elsewhere.

Unlike many other visions for the future, the new plan proposes only ideas that have been successfully used in other Southern California cities such as Santa Monica, Burbank and even prewar Los Angeles. In many ways, the plan aims to return to urban designs that prevailed before the automobile, a time when various developments were packed close together--but attractively so--to encourage walking.

For instance, Santa Monica’s popular 3rd Street Promenade, a street blocked off to traffic, demonstrates how density can be made attractive and how an ailing commercial strip can be turned into a popular pedestrian nightspot. Burbank’s downtown along San Fernando Boulevard illustrates how to mix apartments with restaurants and bookshops.

Los Angeles planners say they are even learning lessons from their own city. The Leimert Park neighborhood in South Los Angeles, they say, is an example of how an urban village can survive in the midst of sprawl. And courtyard-style apartments, dating to the 1940s and found throughout the city, offer alternatives to giant stucco boxes.

The two-year effort to redraw the General Plan, last revised in 1974, holds the promise of shaping the way generations of Angelenos will live, work and play, and has gained new urgency as the city recovers from last year’s riots and languishes in a recession.

“I think a lot of people are so busy trying to survive today,” said Senior Planner Emily Gabel and manager of the General Plan project. “They are ready for a different city.”

The General Plan is a blueprint for growth. Rather than dictating specifics, it establishes broad policy goals and sets the tone for smaller, more intensive community plans.

Today, planners are unveiling preliminary sketches of the kinds of development they hope a new General Plan would encourage. Based upon community meetings and interviews with architects, developers and land-use experts, the drawings show attractive and integrated development--a street corner, for example, with smart landscaping and small stores, perhaps located underneath apartments on the upper floors.

The planners will not unveil recommendations for specific streets or areas. That is many months away. But today’s public forum, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. in City Hall, will let planners share their philosophy with the public.

Over the next several months, planners will continue to refine the plan with advice from neighborhood groups and community leaders. They are scheduled to bring it before the City Council in November, 1994.

The city’s existing General Plan is, by most accounts, a good one. It sought to cluster development into widely dispersed centers connected by mass transit. The goal was protecting single-family neighborhoods from ticky-tacky commercial strips and other “unsuitable uses.”

But the plan was never really followed. Only a few centers--downtown, Century City and Warner Center in Woodland Hills--ever developed, partly because of economics. Moreover, during the hurly-burly growth of the 1980s, the Planning Department did little more than act as zoning police, not always able to focus on the big picture with so many little projects.

Often, developers got exemptions from the General Plan with the support of City Council members.

“Planning is just really a matter of political will,” said William Fulton, publisher of the California Planning and Development Report, a monthly magazine. “Planning is about getting three votes. More often than not in Los Angeles, it’s about getting one vote.”

Fulton and others acknowledged that new Mayor Richard Riordan may help the process along, but the city’s weak mayoral system of government limits his ability to force compliance with the plan.