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

this is a national problem as well as a dublin one. i have seen for years on the way up to dublin, villages getting swamped by large housing estates. and now in galway. the whole place is gone daft.
This was the price of progress at the time i suppose but now that we are more confident in ourselves we should look at this problem exactly as is recommended. to say we don’t have a history of apartment living, while true, doesn’t mean that if it’s cheap enough a lot of us wouldn’t.
i have been listening to this argument for years though. everyone saying urban sprawl is terrible. it is but it’s not going to change by talk. developers need a reason to change from the status quo and move forward. otherwise we are still going to be having this discussion in 20 years time. meanwhile our cities become these monsters with, as we talked about before devin, the centres will have students and others in them and will eventually fall into some ruin.the businesses will move out of the centres and into these american style malls.while this is all very basic urban design and planning issues.
at least i must say that ye are trying to do something about that in the capital. (regeneration of the docks etc where at least there are apartments going into the centre of the city, even with all it’s various faults, it still is a step in the right direction) but large scale regeneration is needed or we will be forced into a situatioin where there just isn’t the reasons to but an old building and either flatten and start again .:Dor re-do and re-use as it’s easier to get planning for a few hundred houses out in the sticks.