IT'S great to see planners and architects engage with the idea of regional development and recognise that Dublin's sprawl has had negative consequences both for the capital and the regions. But, for groups like ourselves who have championed balanced regional development, the suggestion that we should develop a larger city on the west coast is daft.

Planners love the idea of building on the existing conurbations like Galway, Cork and Limerick and to allow development to turn them into major cities. It's based on the Barcelona model, where the whole Catalan region is effectively given life because Barcelona is such a large city. Their thinking is that a large enough city will effectively spill over into the area around it.

My view, however, is that it does the opposite. I think that large cities suck people, businesses and social services into them. As a result, these things cannot be available for the rest of the region simply because they're all needed in the city.

But why do we have to start copying models that frankly haven't worked abroad when we could learn from those mistakes and create something that will actually work for us? Just because we like what happens in Barcelona and places like that doesn't mean it's the right model for us.

Developing a larger city on the west coast would most likely reduce quality of life for those who remain in the outlying areas.

These are most likely to be older and more vulnerable people. And what is the difference between travelling 50 miles westwards into traf"c jams, large-scale housing problems and all the social problems created by long-distance commuting?

People are now commuting from as far a way as Mullingar. We've got whole families travelling into Dublin, with kids dropped off to cr�ches or schools miles away from where they live. So what would be the difference for them if we develop a major city on the west coast? They'll just be travelling in the opposite direction, but they'll still have to deal with all the same problems.

We believe that it is more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable to try to plan for communities where people can work and access services locally. This is what the national spatial strategy is about. People criticise the spatial strategy, they say that there's too many hubs and gateway towns and that you can't create sustainable regional entities when you have too many, because you need a critical mass of population to sustain any given region in economic terms.

It's true, there are a lot, but there needs to be a lot of them. And I think economic arguments can be challenged. You will not create a better quality of life in larger conurbations, simply because you are now putting all your energies and taxpayer's money into developing them. I think if we're going to pay for anything, we should pay for a better quality of life rather than looking good on paper.

Now that the spatial strategy has been linked to proper funding and other initiatives, such as transport infrastructure, we actually have a chance to create sustainable communities outside the major cities and create a better quality of life for people who choose not to live in a city. If we don't try to develop rural towns and villages, we will just end up recreating the same problems and social ills that we have on the east coast at the moment and that's just daft. We'll end up with lots of lovely villages, but there'll be nobody in them during the day time. They'll be nice places to visit once, but they'll have no services worth a damn in them.