Madam, - Your Editorial of February 15th on the recent report of the Urban Forum might just lead me to believe that there is now an emerging constituency in this country mobilising against the inexorable sprawl of our urban centres. Not before time of course, as we in the planning and transport professions have been predicting this chaos for a very long time indeed.
It is remarkable in itself that the report commissioned into balanced regional development by Seán Lemass from Colin Buchanan as long ago as 1967 was funded by the United Nations. What a distance we have travelled.
The Urban Forum might just achieve something that the individual institutes representing architects, engineers, planners, surveyors and landscapers have never been able to do on their own: to lead a proper debate on the management of growth on this small island. A challenging all-island view of the National Spatial Strategy, with its doubtful gateways and spurious hubs, is now overdue. The NSS was a political compromise in a nation simply not ready to engage in a debate on a regional planning and hell-bent on development at pretty much any cost anywhere.
There are, however, good signs that hard lessons have been learned as town halls across the country now try to come to terms with the implications of this period of rapid and possibly misguided urban expansion.
The Urban Forum intervention is to be welcomed and the Minister should respond by initiating a revision of the core thesis of the NSS. It was fine as a holding position in 2004, but it is no longer a credible proposition for dealing with Dublin's sprawl and addressing accelerating regional imbalance. - Yours, etc,
PAUL McTERNAN, Director, Colin Buchanan, Windsor Place, Dublin 2.