Re: Re: Irish Towns – future planning

Maskhadov, have you been to Ongar near Clonsilla? It’s a typical new greenfield suburban housing district, with a mix of semi-d & apartment development. But in order to give the place a ‘centre’, they’ve created from scratch a 19th-century-style town main street – it’s quite absurd! …so you have setbacks and twists in the building line, variations in heights and widths, underpasses, pictched roofs…
It’s easy to knock (and I burst out laughing when I saw it), but they went out of their way to create a distinct centre & sense of place, which is usually woefully absent in these places (but perhaps they took too literally the urgings that we need to create sucessful places in new development like we did in the past!).