Sustainable Residential Development in Urban Areas

esidential lands and must also be integrated with the provision of
public transport, schools, community and leisure facilities etc. This
will involve keeping up the close contact with other agencies, which
would have occurred during the plan-making period.
Integrated development plan team
2.5 At the strategic level, the development plan is the spatial expression
of the county development board (CDB) strategy, and good liaison
between the City / County Development Board2 and the
development plan team is necessary. However, when preparing a
development plan, a number of service providers are involved, both
internally, e.g. water provision, sewerage provision, and externally,
e.g. schools provision, health services, transport services. While
these service providers will be consulted through the development
plan process, ideally they should be part of an extended development
plan team. This would give them an awareness of the role that they
will play in the future development of the lands and allow them to
begin considering the implications of the development plan proposals
for their own investment programmes into the future.
Local area plans
2.6 Section 19 1(b) of the Planning and development Act 2000 states that a
local area plan (LAP) shall be made in respect of an area which firstly
is designated as a town in the most recent population census (and
where such a town is not designated as a suburb or environs), which
has a population of more than 2,000 people and which is situated
within the functional area of a planning authority. Where it is
indicated in a development plan that a LAP is to be prepared, an
indicative timeframe for its completion should be set out.
2.7 In addition, where substantial areas of brownfield or greenfield sites
are going to be (re)developed, it is strongly recommended that a local
area plan (LAP) be prepared to facilitate the sustainable development
of the area and to avoid it being developed in a piecemeal and
incoherent fashion over a long period of time. The advantage of using
the LAP approach is that as a statutory plan it will have been through
the planning process, will have involved local consultation and the
2 This is further elaborated in the 2007 Development Plan Guidelines (p.14)
9
Planning Guidelines