New housing estates are badly planned, says architect

MUCH of the housing development taking place in towns and villages is poorly designed and ill considered, a conference on the Future of Towns & Villages in Ireland heard yesterday.

Leading architect Mike Shanahan told the conference in Limerick that we urgently need to tackle the problem of ‘dead-end’ housing estates being built on the edges of towns and villages.

While we witnessed ‘bungalow blitz’ across open countryside over the past 40 years, smaller towns and villages, he said, had been left pretty much unscathed until recently.