Growing SuburbsWith so many high-density developments under way, we shall soon find out if Dublin's new suburbs are well planned or not, reports Frank McDonald, Environment Editor

We've become accustomed to "the shock of the new" in Dublin by now - big blocks of apartments looming in the most unlikely places. You expect it in the city centre, where whole streets have been transformed, but it's also become quite a phenomenon in low-rise suburban areas, even on the fringes of the city.

Who would ever have thought that we would see apartment blocks up to six storeys high being tacked on to an old village like Stepaside, in the foothills of the mountains? Yet along the road to Enniskerry, there they are - rising out of the undulating landscape behind granite-faced boundary walls with names like Bellarmine and Aikens Village.

Back in 1998, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council identified Stepaside as an area of major expansion with the rezoning of several hundred acres for housing. Much of this land had already been bought up on a speculative basis by property developers such as Castlethorn, Park Developments, Deane Homes and Dalegrove Construction.

Not long after the publication in 1999 of new Residential Density Guidelines, the county council unveiled an action plan for the area stretching from Enniskerry Road to Ballyogan Road and clearly signalled a move away from the "sterile" suburban estates of old towards a different, higher density type of residential development.

There were to be "greenway spines" running through the area, including cycle paths; local employment centres to reduce car commuting; a possible extension of Luas from Sandyford, with feeder services to the Stillorgan Road QBC in the interim; and a historic protection area covering the ancient mound of Kilgobbin church.

Inevitably, local people feared that the existing 160 cottages and council houses in Stepaside would be overwhelmed by all the new development. At the time, all it had was a small Garda station, two pubs, a butcher's shop and a post office/general store. The growth of traffic on an already congested route to Dublin was a real concern.

Luas will come, but not until 2008. The planned extension to Cherrywood will veer off the old Harcourt Street railway line to run down Ballyogan Road, right at the edge of the Stepaside development zone. But since there isn't much local employment, most of the new residents are commuting by car at least as far as Sandyford.

The most attractive development in the area is Bellarmine, STET designed for Castlethorn by Paul Duignan and Associates and McCrossan O'Rourke Manning. It also has the most varied mix, including two-storey houses, duplex over garden-level units and apartment blocks ranging in height from three to six storeys.

Promised facilities in a village centre include a health centre, convenience shops, wine and coffee bars, a pharmacy and a video store, though none of these have yet materialised. David Rowe, of An Taisce, says more community facilities will be needed, including new schools, if the current pace of development in Stepaside is maintained.

Plans by Richmond Properties to provide 75 apartments, 12 shops and a new pub on the site of the Mountain View Inn and part of the adjoining pitch-and-putt course were shot down by An Bord Pleanála last February. It agreed with local residents that the "excessive scale" of the development would be "out of character" with the village.

The appeals board has come under fire from estate agents Hooke & MacDonald over its raft of refusals in the last few months for higher density housing schemes in Churchtown, Stillorgan, Leopardstown, Goatstown and the Smurfit site at Beech Hill, off Clonskeagh Road - all of which had been approved by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown's planners.

In a bluntly-worded review of the board's record, which was submitted to Minister for the Environment Dick Roche, Hooke & MacDonald claimed that its "hard-line approach to decision-making" - particularly in rejecting major schemes on design grounds alone - "contravenes Government housing policy and fails first-time buyers".

The agents described as "dubious" the board's contention that these developments were poorly designed because they contained too many one-bedroom apartments, many of them "single aspect", saying it was "quite impractical to require almost all apartments to be dual aspect" if density was to be maximised to cater for first-time buyers.

One of Hooke and MacDonald's principal arguments is that most of Dublin's suburbs consist of standard two-storey detached, semi-detached and terraced houses with three or more bedrooms, so why should new apartment schemes have to provide "family-type" accommodation in areas dominated by this type of housing?

But Henk van der Kamp, Dutch-born president of the Irish Planning Institute, leaped to An Bord Pleanála's defence, saying that a "knee jerk" response to market conditions, without a proper focus on basic standards of good planning and design, would "create potential planning disasters similar to the Ballymun experience in the 1960s".

Since so many high-density residential developments have gone through the planning process in recent years, with a lot of them actually built, we shall soon find out.

Stepaside is only one example. Similar schemes are transforming Sandyford, Finglas, Pelletstown, Park West, Baldoyle and what the planners call Dublin's "north fringe".

The approach to Finglas from the city has been dramatically changed, with new apartment blocks and even a hotel flanking the N2 dual-carriageway, while anyone travelling from Sligo to Dublin by train will have had a good view of the startling scheme being rolled out at Pelletstown, on a tract of land between the Royal Canal and the Tolka.

Flagship of this new suburb-in-the-making is Ballymore's Royal Canal Park, which will contain around 1,200 apartments in five- and six-storey blocks when it's finished as well as community facilities such as a creche, convenience stores and cafés. Buses already run to the city centre from its main street and there's a commuter rail station nearby.

Altogether, some 4,500 new homes are to be built on the 105-acre site, which was the last remaining tract of agricultural land within the city boundary when it was rezoned in 1998. A further 2,300 homes are being developed by Flynn and O'Flaherty on the Phoenix Park Racecourse, alongside the Navan Road, further transforming the area.

Availability of good public transport is also driving the transformation of Sandyford Industrial Estate.

Its early portal-frame sheds have given way to office blocks, and now the area looks set to receive a large injection of residential development - thanks mainly to Luas.

The only downside is that all of this will strain the tramline's carrying capacity.

Over at Adamstown, in south Lucan, where 25,000 people will end up living, South Dublin County Council's master plan would fall apart unless it is well-served by public transport. That's why An Bord Pleanála made its approval conditional on upgrading the Kildare Arrow line - one of the projects included in the "Transport 21" programme.

More than a century ago, when Berlin's Charlottenburg district was being developed, almost the first thing that went in there was a new U-bahn line to serve it. That was planning as it should be, not making it up as you go along, which is what we've been doing - even in the development of denser suburbs to counteract the sprawl of Dublin.