So-called "urban villages" -- human-scaled and pedestrian friendly -- may be one way to accommodate California's massive population growth, and at the same time, help improve air quality and reduce sprawl, says a UC Davis environmental designer. The urban village model developed by UC Davis researchers would create compact urban settings in which to live and work, reducing development pressures on farm lands, ecosystems and open spaces. Because the villages would offer more "walkability," automobile use could drop by as much as 25 percent. In the Sacramento Valley, the researchers identify Midtown and Old Sacramento, downtown Davis and Nevada City as already having an urban village structure, says Randall Fleming, managing director of UC Davis' Community Design & Planning Services, part of the campus's environmental design department. To help the researchers apply their model to real-life situations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency earlier this month awarded a grant for work in the Sacramento region and in northern New Mexico. The grant will be supplemented with money from public agencies in New Mexico and California, for a total project amount of $465,375. Fleming and other researchers will develop community-based urban village plans, along with a guide book, tool kit and software. The project, Fleming says, "will have broad transferability to almost all communities struggling with growth and sprawl issues." In Sacramento, Fleming says five neighborhoods will be selected for the development of urban villages, each of which will be located near proposed light-rail extensions. The exact neighborhoods have not yet been determined. "It's an opportunity to use private and public development money for positive changes and to build more sustainable neighborhoods, to make neighborhoods better places to live," Fleming says.