Synthesis Report for the ERTDI-funded project: 2001-LU/CD-(2/3)
Summary: STRIVE Report 2 - Richard Moles & Bernadette O'Regan
Within the National Development Plan 2007–2013, it is recognised that there is a need for additional housing for our growing population. The National Spatial Strategy (NSS) is designed to identify where such new housing might be located, so as to provide for regionally balanced and sustainable development. It was recognised that the effectiveness of the National Spatial Strategy would benefit from additional policy-relevant information on the current sustainability of Irish settlements. Subsequent research calls by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recognised the need to bridge this gap in our knowledge. As a result of these calls, the EPA initially funded a pilot study and subsequently a larger scale study. The pilot project report Methodologies for the Estimation of Sustainable Settlement Size (Moles et al., 2002) described a method for assessing the sustainability of settlements. Results suggested that there existed a relationship between settlement size and sustainability, but data gaps and small settlement sample size limited the reliability of the results. The larger project reported here aimed to fill data gaps, further develop and apply quantitative methods to define the relationship between sustainability and settlement attributes such as population size and location, and to include a much larger sample of settlements.
