Council to de-zone 500 hectares?

Last week Sligo Borough and County Council considered de-zoning 500 hectares of lands zoned for development as reported in the Sligo Champion http://tinyurl.com/3uqrk2y This is a hugely significant move in a national context, made in the context of the 2010 Planning Act's requirement for Development Plan's to follow core strategies. There has been remarkably little comment about this outside of local media.

Away from the specific case of Sligo, this in many ways it shows the planning system following the market yet again i.e. theres no volume house building at the moment so we'll just dezone all their land. However, there was no equivalent attempt to look at rural housing guidance, while choking land supply in urban areas. There is no attempt to look at how to facilitate cheap build your-own solutions within urban areas, or serving self-build plots, and shared services.

There is a wider issue where the macro-scale interests of NAMA are preventing micro-scale developments for ordinary people, because NAMA assumes the national interest is recovery of land/development values and pretending current values are not real values (delusion on a Mao level). But more on NAMA another time.....

... I just hate the way architects and city planners and everyone else responsible for urban life seems to have lost sight of what cities are for. They are for people. That seems obvious enough, but for almost half a century we have been building cities that are for almost anything else; for cars,for business, for developers, for people with money and bold visions who refuse to see cities from ground level, as places in which people must live and function and get around.
- Bill Bryson (1998) Neither here nor there (Travels in Europe), pp 61-62.