A Glittery Bit of Urban Make-Believe : MCA’s new CityWalk attraction will lead to a global phenomenon. Cities of the future will have streets that resemble movie sets, designed to realize fantasies.

Now that Universal CityWalk has been declared a financial success, it is time to evaluate what it promises for the Valley--and elsewhere.

First of all, CityWalk apparently will get considerably larger.

The original plan, by architect Jon Jerde, involved 40 blocks of multiple-use stores and workplaces. MCA’s director of development, Jim Nelson, will not go that far. He will commit only to a little beyond the first two blocks, plans to add a children’s science museum, a restaurant, a hotel and possibly a “sports neighborhood.”

But in the same breath Nelson speaks of the future CityWalk as a larger “pedestrian spine” connecting the Universal movie studio, theme park and amphitheater--a kind of Viennese Ringstrasse for residents within a five-mile radius.

Throughout Southern California, suburban cities have come of age, with industrial parks and banking districts. But they are still essentially designed like bedroom communities, with much smaller downtown cores than older industrial cities.

Jerde and Nelson complain that L.A. planning destroys its urban centers, that public spaces frequently are bulldozed away. CityWalk presumably will be safe from that. Moreover, urban threats are continents away, down the Basin. CityWalk is hygienic and poverty-proof.

Of course the safety has a price. The walker becomes a tourist, the city a movie set.

But this is hardly a new strategy. Let us not sound nostalgic. Both Venice, Calif., (1904) and Las Vegas (1946) were designed that way, to deliver the carnival of city life in a strictly domesticated space. Even Coney Island (1910) was much the same, before fires destroyed the major amusement parks. In 19th-Century Europe, glassed-over shopping arcades were CityWalks of a kind, as were botanical gardens and World’s Fairs. All relied on exaggerated, eye-popping consumer architecture.

Eventually, CityWalks will be a global phenomenon, perpetual World’s Fairs. Cities all over the globe will have streets that resemble movie sets.

What else sells? Urban decay? A “Blade Runner” theme park wouldn’t draw flies (or nothing but flies). Consumer spaces need a sweet tooth. CityWalk pulled in more than 100,000 visitors on its opening weekend, two months ago.

Even ancient Asian cities are ordering millions of square feet of shopping arcades, in forbidden mini-cities. In fact, the Forbidden City itself, in Beijing, is on its way to becoming a CityWalk of sorts, since the government has announced it will be open to tourists.

The Jerde partnership is designing the first phase of a $350-million mixed-use center in Guangzhou, China. This phase involves 1.8 million square feet of a total 2.8 million that will include shopping, offices, movie theaters, clubs, a “family fun” area and a trade office. Like CityWalk, Jerde says, it is being designed to realize the fantasies of the local population.

Other L.A. firms have been hired to design theme parks for Seoul, for old Shanghai and still more for Japan. So many attractions are planned for Osaka, I wonder if someday we may call it Orlando Far East.

And now we learn that Budapest, Hungary, has a theme park spoofing communism with statues of Marx, Lenin and Ho Chi Minh on a path leading to a 50-foot brick wall. A Hollywood Reporter headline caught the mood by calling it Marxworld.

There’s no point grumbling. Be a happy hostage. Most visitors are enraptured by CityWalk. I’m less excited, but I can see that CityWalk has the narrative quality that the architects claim for it. CityWalk’s narrative is a re-enactment of the fears and hopes of L.A.

Put another way, it has something of the relationship to the real city that a petting zoo has to nature.

We live in the era when Pacific suburbia is making its monuments, CityWalk among them, but the suburban origins show. CityWalk borrows from malls and instant landscaping. Its movie walls are a cute way to hide the decay of Los Angeles.

Compare it to Disneyland’s Main Street in the Fifties. Most visitors had functioning Main Streets in their towns. They also knew Main Streets were dying, victims of new freeways and shopping centers.

Disney’s scrubbed, underscale, cutesy Main Street must have struck an ironic chord, part-silly and part-sinister.

Today, commercial boulevards like Larchmont, Melrose and the Venice boardwalk are at risk. Like Main Streets in 1956, they are still here but losing out to malls.

We realize that unprotected public spaces will decline in the Nineties, during the panic that has followed the uprising of 1992 and the continuing shocks to our economy.

At CityWalk, oversize candy displays next to antique neon signs play with that fact. The storefronts are monumental, but the streets are tiny, user-friendly, easy for the pedestrian to master. We are in control of our city. From every direction, the fractious facades project innocence, like bits of a Spielberg movie about the late, great city of Los Angeles.

It is a very charming elegy. It may also be an epitaph. Has any other Pharaoh built a monument to the Underworld as blatantly funny? It is a perfect accompaniment to a good crime film at the multiplex. It is the public space of the future.