Dick Gleeson, deputy city planning officer with Dublin Corporation, is not alone in believing the debate about the State's housing needs is almost exclusively focused on absolute numbers and population projections when "the central challenge is to create good places for people to live and work".
What we should be doing, he says, is trying to "break the mould of featureless suburban housing crawling across the landscape" by offering new models to the public. "But we are so concerned with the shortfall in the number of houses that we haven't time to say it's important to achieve quality urban areas." Incredibly, the word "quality" isn't mentioned anywhere in last year's landmark Planning and Development Act. Indeed, since the abolition of An Foras Forbartha in 1988, there has been little or no research on the impact of urbanisation, and not much on what choices might be made in terms of urban form.
As Brendan Williams and Patrick Shiels of the DIT in Bolton Street have pointed out, the prevailing development pattern still involves the rapid creation of new residential areas without adequate infrastructure or social facilities - repeating mistakes we've been making since the 1960s.
Thirty years on, we still have no urban structure plans to regulate the ad-hoc addition of endless layers of new housing. Part of the reason is that planners find it difficult to make the leap from coloured maps and diagrams to the more refined level of creating places. They are also seriously overworked.
Though there is now general agreement on the underlying principles, such as the importance of linking mixed land use with good public transport, getting down to detail about what these development areas are going to look like and feel like is proving quite difficult. We're just making it up as we go along.
"Creating urban form is one of the most challenging things around," according to Dick Gleeson. "Sometimes you have to work ridiculously hard on it to get a spatial layout with coherence and build around that while, at the same time, creating different character areas. It is not an easy task, even for architects." Putting shape on the development of a greenfield site, such as Pelletstown, off the Navan Road, can be tortuous - especially if breaking the mould is one of the objectives.
Urban design plans are also needed for Naas, Navan, Athlone and other growth centres. "They need to roll up their sleeves and say, `How can we accommodate, say, an additional 40,000 people here in a phased way that extends the existing urban structure, with excellent interfaces and good social and cultural facilities?' " as Mr Gleeson puts it.
Mary Warren Darley, the lone planner co-ordinating the Greater Dublin Area Strategic Planning Guidelines (SPGs), agrees the urban nature of growth centres must be addressed - as it has been, she believes, in the plan for Navan, which includes a concert hall and third-level college. But will the funding be provided to pay for it?
Ms Darley says it is not just a bald question of population growth, but of the number of households that will have to be catered for - perhaps 200,000 in the Greater Dublin Area alone. In this context, she believes too many standard three- to four-bedroom homes are being built and not enough smaller units. If the SPGs are to be implemented, however, a Greater Dublin Authority will have to take the important strategic decisions about the location of new facilities with a regional impact, such as shopping centres or business parks. It would also have to be given a mandate to oversee the delivery of a new transport infrastructure.
Williams and Shiels have noted that a strong and effective strategic planning regime is one of the characteristics of compact, "sustainable" European cities. In the US, by contrast, fragmented local government has been one of the principal factors contributing to a pattern of suburbanisation based on "leapfrog" scattered development.
But even in the US, there is a recognition that sprawl results in congested roads, overcrowded schools and inadequate public utilities. As a result, public policy there is now promoting the "smart growth" concept which involves locating clusters of housing, designed to cater for different social and age groups, close to public transport.
The strategy being pursued here, however, represents a "transport nightmare", as economist Mr Colm McCarthy has warned. And this is not confined to the Greater Dublin Area, as last week's series of articles in The Irish Times on the explosion of Dublin spelled out - most of Leinster is in danger of being consumed by Dublin's expansion and the traffic it will generate.
New motorways and major road schemes now being fast-tracked by the National Roads Authority not only threaten to destroy environmentally sensitive areas but also pose another danger that development will gather around these sinews in the absence of strict planning controls. But if the pattern of development is to be changed, investment in new growth centres will have to be made ahead of demand to create the right conditions. The danger here is that this could lead to a "shopping-list mentality", based on such notions that all a town needed to get going is a regional airport or a batch of civil servants. The move by councillors in Kerry to amend the county plan so that farmers "in financial need" would be able to get planning permission for bungalows on their land, even in designated high amenity areas, shows just how difficult it will be to achieve a consensus on a national spatial strategy. How do all the people building bungalows in the countryside think they are going to get around when they reach the age of 80? Who is going to bring them to Sunday Mass, for example? That's just one of the many reasons why we must strive to create quality urban areas, at much higher densities, so that everything will be within reach.