ONE OF Europe's leading planners said yesterday that she was "astonished" by the sprawl of housing in rural Ireland.
She said it represented a "spoiling of the territory" that should be protected in the public interest.
Virna Bussadori, president of the European Council of Spatial Planners, told The Irish Timesthat "green land shouldn't be used for building houses everywhere" and the Government should be doing more to protect these areas.
Ms Bussadori, who is Italian, said she feared that Ireland was following the example of the Veneto region of her own country, which had been despoiled by the random construction of factories all over its previously unspoiled countryside.
She said she knew that her concerns about what was happening in Ireland was shared by most Irish planners. "What people should understand is that land is not an infinite resource," she added.
Speaking at the presentation of European urban and regional planning awards in Dublin Castle, Ms Bussadori said planning would play a key role in making cities more competitive in order to meet the new economic challenges.
A proper planning process needed to "connect the present to a shared vision for future development", she said. "It is also crucial to present those scenarios in such a way that decision-makers and the public can understand them easily."
Irish Planning Institute president Andrew Hind said the Irish planning system had been "radically overhauled" over the last decade or so. "That said, everything in the garden is not rosy . . . policy and methodologies can be improved."
The 7th European Urban and Regional Planning Awards were being presented in Ireland for the first time, hosted by the institute.
Presenting the awards, Minister for the Environment John Gormley said the idea of planning as "bringing the future into the present" was "simply another take on a concept which is very close to my heart - the whole area of sustainability."
Not one of the award winners was Irish, although the Minister hailed the success of Sarriguren "eco-city" in Spain in the environmental sustainability category - it aims to put "eco-urbanism" into practice by promoting the use of renewable energy.
The "Green Metropolis", a tri-national regional development project involving Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, won the cross-border planning award, while the city of Drammen in Norway took the urban region award for the quality of its planning. The award for public participation in planning was shared by Rombeek-Enschede (the Netherlands) and the regeneration of Stonebridge housing estate in London.