More than four years after the official conversation about the redevelopment of downtown Columbia began, we're no closer to anything resembling a true plan.

While the pictures of promenades and arts centers offered up this week by the executives of General Growth Properties Inc. will certainly tickle the imagination, there's no way for residents and county officials to assess them because of the part of the downtown master plan the company has yet to reveal.

Instead of delivering the whole plan it had promised, General Growth this week let everybody in on phase one, which won't require any zoning changes. It includes visions of an outdoor ice rink, an arts district, a rebuilt Merriweather Post Pavilion and a new hotel. All wonderful-sounding stuff.

What it doesn't include is the part of the iceberg below the surface.

The engine that is to drive the kind of urban vibrancy everyone keeps talking about is people, and General Growth plans to infuse Town Center with new residents. These people are to live, company officials say, in 5,500 new housing units to be added over the next 30 years. The plan released this week doesn't spell out where these will be or what kind of buildings will house them or at what rate they'll be built.

That information is to come in phase two -- the part of the plan that will require the county to approve a zoning change -- which the company says it will unveil sometime within the next few months. General Growth also says it will tell the world what the plan will cost and who will pay for it at that future date.

No one can reasonably judge General Growth's plan until we see the housing piece, the part that will affect schools and roads. Residents will be going into the company's ''Community Discussion Series," scheduled over two weeks later this month, without a true understanding of what it intends for Town Center.

What we do know is that the company plans to ask for an exemption from the traffic requirements of the county's adequate-public-facilities ordinance, its rationale being that the urbanized, walkable environment it intends will generate fewer automobile trips than a suburban development with the same number of dwellings.

But at this point what we have mostly are pretty pictures, the same kind of gauzy visions we've seen since the county first began the charrette process in 2005.

It's time for some clarity. It's time for a plan. Without details on the housing factor of the equation, any discussion of the bells and whistles is essentially meaningless.

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