WENDING its way through the city's land-use review process is a set of proposed zoning changes designed to preserve, restore or create - the preferred verb depends upon one's point of view and method of analysis -a Great White Way along and beyond the northern stretch of Times Square. The area covers 17 blockfronts from 43d Street to 50th Street on Broadway and Seventh Avenue.

The goal would be accomplished by introducing higher standards for signage illumination than those mandated by the four-year-old midtown zoning ordinance, and mandate steep building setbacks at 50 to 60 feet, or about four stories up. The standards were developed by the Manhattan office of the Department of City Planning, and are under consideration by the City Planning Commission after a public hearing Nov. 26.

What the public hearing underscored, and subsequent interviews with developers, architects, lawyers and consultants confirm, is that the effect of the regulations probably will go well beyond design issues. Critics say it will become harder to find major office tenants for new buildings, although that would not necessarily be so if the changes set out merely to enhance lighting and signage. Instead, they say, the proposed rules are trying to encourage, by an urban-design ordinance, the retention or establishment of a brightly lit entertainment-oriented district. The standards have touched off a debate that seems to flow inevitably from the consequences of the midtown rezoning enacted in 1982. The object then was to push office development from the East Side to the West Side or Midtown South, and it led to site purchases for that purpose. One of the consequences has been to endanger the glitzy visual characteristics of the Times Square area that had grown out of low redevelopment potentials and low land values of the Times Square area during the 1950's and 1960's.

Time has brought new office buildings, and special zoning incentives have brought some new theaters as well. But the blocks the Planning Department used, with the help of lighting consult-ants, as guides to preserving, restoring or creating the Great White Way look are those that have yet to experience development in the postwar era. The huge signs on those blocks posed no conflict with the existing uses of the older buildings, and in fact enhanced their revenue.