This city known for makeovers is getting ready to try a big one for its downtown. On Grand Avenue, near the much ballyhooed Disney Hall and Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, city leaders earlier this month announced plans for a $1.2 billion redevelopment project complete with massive retail, residential and commercial space. The goal, as seen by billionaire Eli Broad, the plan's biggest booster, would be to transform now doughty Grand Avenue into something of an Angeleno version of Paris's elegant Champs Elysees.

The cosmetic surgery doesn't stop there. Down the road from downtown's Bunker Hill, where most of Los Angeles's '80s-vintage office towers sit, the city has embraced another huge billion-dollar-plus entertainment, hotel, retail and residential center that would serve as a draw for the less-cultured crowd. Envisioned as a "Times Square West," this confection would service the convention crowds who now largely ignore the central city.

For years the relatively modest scale of L.A.'s downtown has made many boosters feel decidedly second rate. Mr. Broad, for example, repeatedly asserts that "every great city has a vital core." Until Los Angeles has such a center, the argument goes, it can't hope to compare not only with Gotham, but even the likes of Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston and scores of other burgs.

On the surface both plans do have their merits, remaking in sharp contours what is now pretty lumpy stuff. But don't be surprised if the inevitable raids on the public purse to help finance some parts of these constructions run into serious opposition from the city's sprawling neighborhoods.

After all, these communities, some of which are a full hour's drive from downtown, already have poured hundreds of millions of hard-earned tax dollars over the past few decades to finance a subway system, failed malls and markets, high-rise construction and public office buildings. Yet to date, for all the effort and hype, downtown has failed to become anything remotely close to the acknowledged business or cultural center of the city.

Nor does the case for such an extreme makeover seem to be as compelling as the elites like to suggest. After all, Los Angeles is not like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Cleveland or Fort Worth, cities that have decided that fancy new buildings, preferably a museum or concert hall, are crucial to get them acknowledged by the world as cool and cultured places.

Los Angeles could not be better known, setting the pace in everything from pop music, sportswear and ethnic food fads to video pornography and grim mystery novels. Over the past century the largely centerless city has evolved from a rough cowboy town to Tinsel Town and is now one of only two cities in the advanced Western world -- New York being the other -- to rank among the world's 20 largest metropolitan areas. Los Angeles County, home to over 10 million people, is not only the undisputed global capital of popular culture but North America's largest port and biggest manufacturing center.

There's also a particular irony in L.A.'s new penchant for downtown monumentalism. From its earliest era, Los Angeles's planners and visionaries decided that they were going to build a very different kind of city. Instead of placing their emphasis on one dominant center, L.A. was to be a multipolar metropolis, with multiple centers surrounded by their own residential communities.

Today such thriving independent cities as Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood and Pasadena boast their own vital "downtowns," cultural institutions, restaurants and promenades. Many neighborhoods within the city limits -- from Sherman Oaks and Studio City in the San Fernando Valley to Leimert Park in South Los Angeles and Koreatown in midtown -- also enjoy a thriving street and cultural life.

Like the city itself, these districts appeal because they do so without much contrivance; those seeking manufactured experiences should drive an hour or so south to Disneyland, instead, where the art was first perfected. The West Coast's largest seaside visitor attraction, Venice Beach, represents the polar opposite of inspired planning; part circus sideshow, flea market and body builders' promenade, it embodies the essential vitality and freedom of the Southern California spirit.

To be sure, this expansive geography has its downsides -- the pitiless traffic being the most prominent example. But it has hardly turned Los Angeles into a cultural desert. Many of the county's most renowned oases for the arts -- from the Pasadena Playhouse and the Hollywood Bowl to the Huntington Library and the Getty, the Norton Simon and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- have thrived far from downtown.

Rather than skulk in shame, L.A.'s elite should realize that their endlessly evolving city constitutes, as one observer put it, "the original in the Xerox machine." The shape of the 21st century -- whether in Houston, Tokyo or Bombay -- generally takes L.A.'s sprawling, decentralized form.

Most tragic of all, the focus on redeveloping downtown via giant quasi-public projects also may mess up the already burgeoning revitalization of the area. Over the past few decades, as much of the corporate business community -- including its two leading banks, First Interstate and Security Pacific -- fell to mergers or quietly fled, downtown has spawned, with little help from City Hall or the civic grandees, a series of specialized industrial districts, ranging from toys and garments to flowers, jewelry and food. Now constituting over 6,000 businesses that employ more than 50,000 Angelenos, these areas are testaments to American urban culture, most particularly the creative force of immigrant-led enterprise.

City Hall and its mandarins may bemoan the lack of street traffic around their downtown, but if they want to see crowds, they need only go to Santee Alley, in the garment district, which is about a 40-minute walk away. A magnet for tens of thousands of Los Angeles's widely diverse people, the area possesses a commercial vibrancy that exceeds New York's Canal Street and approaches the frenzied capitalism of Hong Kong's Mon Kok.

Nor is all of downtown's allure provided by the immigrant masses. Led by pioneer developers like former New Yorker Tom Gilmore, downtown has seen a rash of office-to-apartment conversions that have led to an invasion of the black T-shirt set, attracted to the area's edgy charms. Similarly, many old abandoned industrial and warehouse districts, such as the area adjacent to the Little Tokyo section and nearby Chinatown, have developed into thriving, impromptu arts communities.

Such organic, street-by-street success is what makes for vital neighborhoods, distinguishing truly great cities from ordinary wannabes. Any Podunk can build a stadium, sell its newborn for some Frank Gehry or Rem Koolhaas eye candy, build fancy lofts and shops for the nomadic rich. In contrast, what downtown is already creating on its own -- flourishing commercial hotspots, chaotic consumer souks and effortlessly cool artist colonies -- constitutes the essence of urban genius.

These phenomena should be regarded as the basis of a new future for downtown, one that is unique to Los Angeles, the world's great multipolar city. Encouraging these grassroots developments makes much more sense than expending a couple of billion dollars on creating another monument to ersatz urbanism.