Visitors continue to be attracted by its distinctive charm, but for how long more can Kilkenny promote itself as an unspoilt, medieval city?
A hard-hitting lecture delivered on Kilkenny Radio recently by Mr John Bradley, a historian at NUI Maynooth, suggests that that time has already passed.
The time may even have come, he said, for the city's 17th century motto - "the faire citie" - to be replaced by a more appropriate one for the 1990s, "the developer's city", or perhaps "the city of planning disasters".
"Could anyone today gaze upon the hotel block beside John's Bridge, the steel silos of Smithwick's Brewery, or the concrete car park in Pennyfeather Lane and say that Kilkenny is beautiful? How is it that the medieval townspeople could create a city famed for its beauty and all that we seem to be able to do in the 1990s is destroy it?"
Speculators, said Mr Bradley, throw their hands up and piously refer to the property rights enshrined in our Constitution when confronted with the need for developments to be sensitive to their historic environment.
"But I, for one, cannot believe that our Constitution was passed in order that a few people could make an awful lot of money out of impoverishing the lives of so many. Because that is what recent developments [in Kilkenny] have done. They have disfigured a city whose beauty was a source of pride and pleasure to its citizens."
Kilkenny was increasingly out of touch with its own traditions, he said.
"Boundaries which have been in position for almost a thousand years have been obliterated . . . streets have been widened, disfiguring the subtle balance between the height of the buildings and the breadth of the street . . . buildings out of scale or sympathy with their surroundings have been floated in from the drawing boards of architects who might as well be in outer space.
"It is simply developer vandalism or State vandalism. Yet when the individuals who perpetrate this vandalism are confronted with a group of lager louts smashing a window, or joyriders stealing a car, or youngsters spraying graffiti on a wall, they have no hesitation in calling it vandalism.
"But they do not seem to realise that what the youngsters are doing on a small scale, they - the local authority, the State or private developers - are doing on a big scale: namely, wrecking the physical fabric of a community."
Mr Bradley provided plenty of examples of what he was referring to, such as the demolition of Dean Street and New Street; the creation of an inner city route-way separating St Canice's Cathedral, "the origin of the town", from the rest of the ancient city; and the Pennyfeather Lane car park.
"More of the old city has been destroyed in the past 20 years than at any time since Cromwell. The dilapidated state of the town wall and our other neglected medieval monuments remind us that greed and ignorance are much more powerful than Cromwell ever was."
Mr Bradley's comments have been welcomed by local Fianna Fail TD Mr John McGuinness, whose own views on the subject were aired on this page last January. "A typed transcript of this lecture should be sent to every politician, official and planner in this county and to An Bord Pleanala, and copies should be made available to the public," he said.
"Mr Bradley has bravely stated in extraordinary, forthright language what I and a number of others have been saying for years: we have sold a magnificent heritage, handed down over 700 years, for 30 pieces of speculators' silver."