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WICHITA - Alex Garvin's eyes lit up as he gazed north up Mead from Douglas.

"You have cities across the country spending millions trying to create this," he said, gesturing toward the bricks of Old Town.

"And here, you already have it."

Garvin, an adjunct professor of urban planning and management at Yale University and one of the country's most decorated urban planners, spent Tuesday doing his homework for his lecture tonight at the Wichita Downtown Development Corp.' s annual meeting.

Garvin will continue his tour of Wichita's downtown today, making notes on the advantages and disadvantages the area faces as it works toward revitalization.

Tuesday afternoon, he walked briskly through the cold of Old Town, snapping pictures and marveling at sights "I really didn't expect."

"I'm surprised at how much I like it, frankly," Garvin said. "When I saw the printed material on it, it looked to me as if it were fake. And in fact, it's very real.

"It's what you do with the larger buildings and the smaller squares. Now, some of them are for parking, and that's intelligent. There's a sense of place here that I would not expect."

Old Town's value lies in its environment, Garvin said.

"It's not the arches or the brick paving or the streetlamps," he said. "It's the open spaces that tie this all together, and I didn't expect that.

"Also, from the material I saw it seemed too spread out. In fact, it's walkable, and it's six stories, and it's continuous."

Jeff Fluhr, WDDC president, was Garvin's tour guide.

One topic was downtown's residential demographic.

"What about children?" Garvin asked.

"At this point, I think you're going to see a lot of singles, empty-nesters, and that's the thing we've got to change about this," Fluhr said.

"We don't have that family element. We need to add that to the opportunities."

"You may not be able to. You don't know," Garvin said. "I'm just trying to figure out what there is. What there should be is another matter."

Garvin scoffed at the idea of putting a hotel in the old Spaghetti Works building on Douglas.

"How many hotels can you support in a town like this?" he asked. "Every place I've looked is a hotel."

Garvin loved Nafzger Memorial Park, at the corner of St. Francis and Douglas.

"I'm a parks lover," he said. "I'm just finishing a book on public parks. All my life, I've been interested in parks, and I think they have a huge impact on cities. What a charming little park."

Garvin is president of Alex Garvin & Associates. He has a long list of professional credits, including managing planning director for New York City's 2012 Olympic bid and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center.