Expert stresses need for wider approach to new housing schemes

New housing needs to offer much more than "vast estates of little boxes" with little architectural merit and no consideration for the wider environment, according to a Welsh developer.

Mr Phil Roberts, director of the Swansea-based Gwalia Housing Group, said yesterday that few developers in Ireland or Wales gave any thought to the need for an integrated approach to design, encompassing transport, employment or education.

"The sad fact is that, irrespective of advances in technology, we are still unable to emulate the successful and sustainable traditional communities which have existed for thousands of years in supposedly less developed parts of the world."

Speaking on the second day of the National Housing Conference, Mr Roberts questioned whether the development of housing in Ireland and Wales could meet the global agenda for environmentally sustainable buildings and the need to create vibrant communities.

He suggested both countries could learn a lot from new housing schemes in Denmark and the Netherlands which were consciously designed as models of "sustainable development" as well as tackling crime, vandalism and social unrest.

One of the keys to their success was that they included a mix of social housing, low-cost home ownership, self-build housing, private rented units and private housing for sale, as well as community centres, shops, schools and workplaces.

Mr Roberts noted that each home in one ecological housing scheme in the Netherlands was so well insulated it could meet its heating and hot water needs with just 1,200 litres of fuel a year - about the same used by an average family car.

Mr Ben Driessen, lecturer in planning at the University of Utrecht, noted that 36 per cent of the housing stock in the Netherlands was still controlled by housing associations; in Ireland, this sector built less than 3 per cent of new homes last year.

However, he told the conference, one of the goals of the new Dutch housing policy was to sell off 50,000 homes a year from the social housing stock to meet a growing demand for relatively low-priced owner-occupied housing.

Mr Driessen said the demand for detached and semi-detached houses in the Netherlands was estimated at 250,000, mainly because their production is capped at 30,000 units per year - less than a third of the 100,000 new homes per year needed over the next decade.

One highly successful Irish experiment in providing more energy-efficient and sustainable housing at Brookview, on the western edge of Tallaght, was detailed by Mr Matt O'Connor, managing director of the National Building Agency.

The Brookview scheme was designed to counteract the low-density sprawl of local authority housing in an area exposed to cold winds, which had compounded people's sense of isolation by leaving them "shivering at the edge" of Dublin.

A "bio-climatic" approach to design was adopted for the scheme, which consists of 110 local authority houses, 114 houses provided by voluntary housing associations, 82 joint-venture homes and 125 private houses which are being sold at affordable prices.

The design took account of local air temperature - on average one degree colder than the Dublin average - as well as wind speed and direction, solar radiation, humidity and rainfall, to provide homes that would be comfortable and energy-efficient.

Mr O'Connor said the £35 million scheme, spearheaded by South Dublin County Council, provided "a real working demonstration and practical example of environmental design to help designers and builders understand the important issues involved".

Mr Paddy McIntyre, head of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, said its remit had been extended to take on board issues of energy conservation and environmental sustain ability by working closely with local communities.

The executive aimed to improve housing conditions across all tenures in the North, to promote high standards of housing design and to ensure that all of its programmes were delivered in a "demonstrably fair" way.