Reply To: Dublin’s sprawl threatens to choke the nation

Originally posted by asdasd

You’re trying to impress me with credentialism. That never works. I am now watching a BCC2 programme about the vandalism of sixties architecture by people who were well credentialed indeed.

Anyway, I still say he was being misleading in saying the city lost people in the last 21 years, without clarifying ( at least in the Independent report) that it had increased sunstantially in the last 7 years, or so.

I suppose we are all on the same side here, and oppose an “irreversible” car dependant city; I also believe that that such opposition is becoming more or less the popular view, which is much better than only having the bien pensant realise that we cannot go on like this.

I am quite familiar with McCarthy’s media appearances, and we are on the same side, he is also on the same side in my opinion.

He gets called in by RTE to do some of the Primetime specials on housing affordability and settlement dynamics. He has never disagreed with the Spatial planning school of thought and has never suggested that Ireland should bungalow out the less developed areas as a solution.

He has consistently argued against the growth of the Outer Leinster commuter belt which basically didn’t exist 10 years ago and I think that his point was if departments are decentralised to places such as Portlaoise and Trim then it is irreversable.

If 40% if semi-redundant institutional lands in the Dublin City Council area were developed for medium/high density housing it would provide 38,000 homes, he is on record as saying that the 40% to be developed should be done so along public transport corridors.

It is useful to have a private sector researcher who has come to such conclusions, it provides additional perspectives in addition to the existing NGO’s and college research fellows coming to similar conclusions.