Ireland needs to implement a long-term planning strategy to provide "a degree of certainty in the land market and for investors", according to Professor Michael Bannon of UCD's Department of Regional and Urban Planning.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Society of Chartered Surveyors in Kilkenny last weekend, he described such forward planning as "a route map to a new horizon", and said that Ireland has been criticised "in the past and more recently" for its localism and lack of strategic thinking.
He said that this long-term outlook is "about planning for the key long-term and generally broad scale investment decisions which if properly managed can shape the progress of a city, a region or a country for 20, 30 or even 50 years ahead."
He pointed to Professor Joe Lee's words in Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society - poignant at a time of global economic uncertainty - that "small states rely heavily upon the quality of their strategic thinking to counter their vulnerability to international influences. Without superior strategic thinking, they will be buffeted rudderless, like corks on a wave".
He also praised the work by Forfas on Shaping our Future: A strategy for Enterprise in Ireland in the 21st century (1996) as a "testimony to the value and effectiveness of strategic thinking in respect of one key sector of the economy up to 2016 and beyond".
Professor Bannon said it was "time to learn from this experience and from the example of our competitor countries and to prepare a comprehensive investment strategy to shape this society from now until 2025 or 2050."
He chose Denmark as an example of a country with similarities to Ireland but with a long history of spatial planning to capitalise on the distinct characteristics of each region so they are internationally competitive, to create economically robust regions.
Instead of zoning large tracts of land for business development, the Danes have a policy of zoning only the amount that actually corresponds to the actual demands of business.
Their policy is to ensure the balanced development of all regions, the emergence of a polycentric urban network and a system of national centres which will support business and social, ecological and economical development.
The Irish have lagged behind in the forward planning stakes partly because of our innate "sense of fatalism", our attitude towards property ownership and because our planning system has comparatively recent origins, he said
However, recent initiatives have begun to address the problem such as the Planning and Development Act 2000, the establishment of a legal basis for Local Area Plans and Regional Planning Guidelines together with the National Spatial Strategy, 2000-2006 which set out the Government's objective for regional policy.
