Don’t blame the planners, blame the system

On Friday, I spoke at University College Cork Planning Society’s conference. If I were a planning student now, I would be concerned about the reputation and future role of my profession in Ireland. In line with other market-led development systems, over the past couple of decades, public planning has been demonised, albeit with little evidence to back up the criticisms. Far too often planning is vilified as something that mitigates against development rather than facilitates it — and in facilitating, it also makes some people very wealthy. This can be seen quite easily nowadays in the “book value” of land with planning permission, where the permission has created great value without anything necessarily having been built.

Read the full article @ The Times