They're Talking the Walk

From: Groves, Martha. "They're talking the walk," Los Angeles Times, 13 January 2007:

Century City was envisioned in the 1960s as a bold experiment in urban planning — a sleek, efficient "second downtown" of high-rise office buildings where the car was king.

Now the district is the focus of a new urban experiment designed to undo the sort of auto-centric design that marked planning in Los Angeles for much of the last half-century. The vision — prompted by a looming boom in the construction of luxury condo towers — calls for a greener Century City that would be less about driving and more about walking.

Anticipating the arrival of potentially thousands of residents, a task force of property owners, developers and planners is dreaming of more open space, rows of stately trees and a pedestrian loop that would connect the new housing with the vastly expanded Westfield Century City shopping center, office towers and a growing number of restaurants and cultural amenities.

The effort, now in the most preliminary stage, would represent one of the most ambitious attempts to remake a section of Los Angeles into a place where people could get to shops, restaurants and even offices on foot. . . .