Ireland's recently built housing areas generally lack any sense of place or regional identity and tend to be characterised by "anywhere architecture", according to a British specialist in residential design.
Architect Melville Dunbar told the closing session of the Irish Planning Institute's annual conference in Cork that building traditions here had been discarded in favour of the "discount-style ubiquitous box".
This often meant "car dominant, serried ranks of dwellings with a similar plan form set at uniform distances apart, no spatial variety or contrast, and little regard to human scale and convenience".
According to Mr Dunbar, many local authorities are "bereft of ideas on how to improve the design quality of new housing" and seek refuge in the application of quantity-driven residential density standards.
Cork architect Roddy Hogan said his profession seemed to regard suburban housing as uninteresting and "uncool", which was a pity because it was what most people aspired to in raising a family.
"Their cars have to be a bit like ponies hitched to a rail in front of the house ready for immediate use to take kids here, there and everywhere, to get to the golf club or hurling match, the weekly shop or just a paper."
The Cork Area Strategic Plan was held up as an example for other cities if they wanted to ensure that transport was provided in tandem with new housing areas.
The plan's 20-year blueprint and the elaborate "choreography" involving local authorities, public transport providers and private developers would result in reopening the Cork-Midleton rail line in 2007. Minister of State for the Environment Batt O'Keeffe said it was expected that developers along the old railway line would contribute up to €50 million towards reopening it.
With €90 million committed by the Government, this flagship project would now be realised, according to Jack Sheehan, director of consultants WS Atkins (Ireland), who drafted the strategic plan five years ago.
"There's nothing like funding to knock heads together," Mr Sheehan told the conference, but it was also based on a clear vision and good leadership at local level.
In the case of the strategic plan, local authorities, Iarnród Éireann, Bus Éireann, Cork Airport, UCC, Cork Institute of Technology and Cork Chamber of Commerce were "all pulling in the same direction". The vision to which they had signed up was to develop Cork as "a leading European city region building on its strengths to become a world class centre for learning, innovation and enterprise" by 2020.
Universities and other third-level institutes also had a vital role to play in regional development because they could "propel the knowledge-based economy" so essential to success, he told nearly 300 planners.
Niall Cussen, a senior planner in the Department of the Environment, said it was trying to "put practical flesh on some of the ideas" in regional planning guidelines, in line with the National Spatial Strategy.
It was also promoting the "Atlantic gateways" concept of linking Galway, Limerick, Cork and Waterford because such a "metropolitan corridor" offered the best prospect of counter-balancing Dublin.
