Proposed CityWalk Mall

Your article was well written, timely and provocative. Talented professionals are involved in CityWalk and the completed project is likely to provide urban experiences both fun and interactive.

With luck, CityWalk will also provoke further exploration and understanding of our larger, contemporary, evolving city--reaching at least to Santa Barbara and Palm Springs and San Diego. This extraordinarily dynamic World City, with all its energy and failings and glories and incompleteness and potential, is a special laboratory for inventing a better urban life in the 21st Century. The images of galaxy and constellations referenced by your reporter date back at least to a paper I gave in Mexico City in 1987.

Perhaps CityWalk can serve up some useful perspectives on our past and possibly on current-day micro-urban design. The more demanding challenge for urban design, however, is to foster livability and community, economic viability, ecological balance, and opportunity for human fulfillment in all the stars and constellations throughout the galaxy of our unique World City.

FRANK HOTCHKISS, AIA

Laguna Niguel