The developers of the University Square property on West Franklin Street said all the right things at a meeting in Chapel Hill Town Hall last week.

Talk, of course, is easy. The test, as always, will be in the follow-through.

John McColl, executive vice president of development for Cousins Properties, told a crowd of about 30 people Thursday that his company is planning to replace what is now University Square and its parking lot with new buildings and green space. The project, in keeping with the current trend, is simply called 123 West Franklin (not to be confused with 140 West Franklin, the condo tower project under construction right across the street).

The designers, he said, plan to open the site up and make it "permeable" - encouraging pedestrian traffic into and through the area.

They intend to create a grassy quad in the interior of the space "similar to the American Tobacco interior," referring to the renovated American Tobacco Campus near the Durham Bulls Athletic Park in Durham.

Sounds great. It's an image in sharp contrast to the current geography of the site.

Although we love many of the businesses in University Square (we're looking at you, 35 Chinese), the shopping center's layout could hardly be less inviting, especially to the pedestrian traffic this community professes to value.

The shopping center is an island surrounded by parking lots, with chain-link fences on its borders. A brick wall forms a barrier between the businesses and the sidewalk, and anyone entering the parking lot is under surveillance by University Square's famously vigilant parking security guards.

So the picture McColl painted of a new design that would invite passersby to enter the space, to shop or eat or even just pass through or linger - on actual grass, no less - sounds welcome indeed.

Of course, the new project won't exactly be pastoral parkland.

More than half a million square feet of new retail, office, rental housing and "flex" space are planned, along with an underground parking garage. The redevelopment, incidentally, does not include Granville Towers, which will remain right where they are.

Still, the plan offers perhaps the best opportunity Chapel Hill has come up with to emulate the success of the American Tobacco Campus (or, on a smaller scale, the Weaver Street lawn in Carrboro).

The American Tobacco project resurrected a collection of buildings that once housed a huge tobacco factory and turned it into an inviting, casual yet elegant space that offers outdoor dining, concerts under the stars and, most improbably, a man-made river running through the middle of it.

It's an excellent example of a well-made urban space (admittedly, it has the advantage of being situated adjacent to both the DBAP and the Durham Performing Arts Center), and it's a good model for 123 West Franklin.

So we're happy to hear the ideas McColl presented. We'll be happier when they're more than ideas.