Ted Turton picks his words carefully as he explains the inclusion in this year's Cork Midsummer Festival of a national forum under a working title of "the art of engineering cities". He resists the suggestion that as Cork is a city in which priorities of engineering, rather than those of art, decide and define its modern architecture, the title is provocatively apt.

There is, however, a tightrope quality to this aspect of the interview. As artistic director of the festival, also known as Blas Chorcai, he has to keep his balance.

"We see the festival as being involved with issues such as architecture and design in the urban context: the appearance of the city, any city, as an art in itself," he says. Explaining, never mind activating, such a concept in Cork is going to be an uphill struggle, but so far City Hall hasn't winced, and nor does Turton expect it to.

"I have never separated buildings and landscape from the arts. I was studying art and design at college, and there never seemed to be a reason to exclude principles of art from aspects of design. I believe in the arts not because I'm an administrator but because I'm an artist."

Coming to Cork last year from Galway, where he had co-founded and, since 1996, been artistic director of that city's arts festival, Turton was too late to make much of an impact on Midsummer Festival 2000. This is the second year of his three-year contract and the year when he could make his mark.

He is reluctant to make any comparisons between the festivals in Cork and Galway but agrees there is one important difference: Galway Arts Festival gets £175,000 from the Arts Council, Cork's gets £15,000.

A little coy about budgets - properly the business of administrator Clare Oliver - he admits the current programming limit of £30,000 means he can't commission very much. "We realise we're at the stage where there has to be a massive increase in funding if we're to be taken seriously as a festival," he says.

Cork wants the festival to be taken seriously, especially in the context of the current competition for designation as European City of Culture 2005. Yet the notion of investment in the arts has been slow to catch on, even though Cork Corporation, which provides 40per cent of the festival's funding, has been one of the more generous local authorities in terms of supporting the arts.

Perhaps the problem is that, with festivals, the returns on investment are what might be called long-term. Yet it should be possible to learn from Galway, especially as Joe Gavin has become Cork's city manager after being Galway's.

Scale has always been influential in Turton's life. Coming to Ireland after art college in Leicester in 1973 - when, he reminisces a little ruefully, "everything was happening, the world was turning upside down" - he went to work designing decorative mirrors with Stephen O'Mara in Dublin.

They couldn't make them quickly enough to meet the demand they stimulated, and big business took over. But Turton stayed on in Dublin to found, with John Doyle and Ciaran McGinly, a ten-penny rag of a magazine called In Dublin.

It was a time of beginnings: he remembers Bob Geldof pacing the office, burning with impatience and energy and the birth pangs of The Boomtown Rats. But again, the work changed to meet the priorities of city publishing, he was tired, several things came to an end at the same time and the young man went west.

Despite its small-scale start, Galway worked well from the outset. Turton and Ollie Jennings and their friends had to knock on a lot of doors, but the doors were opened. The result was a city with confidence in what it can achieve.

During the years it took to build Galway Arts Festival to its present status - in those days Turton and his friends had years - his skills in graphic design kept him employed, and there was a six-year spell with Footsbarn, the travelling theatre group now based in France.

His wife, Lali Morris, is the recently appointed artistic director of Baboro, the children's arts festival that is also based in Galway and, with Macnas, is a branch of the original arts-festival tree. The marital commute between Cork and Galway is possible because the Cork job isn't a full-time contract, although Turton is already leading a committed life in the city, working on the boards of the Granary Theatre and Cork Arts Development Committee in Cork and of the Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, where he lives.

He is scrupulous in mentioning the festival sponsors - led by Marks &Spencer, Barry's Tea and Jurys Hotel - which provide 30 per cent of the finance, to which the county council adds 10 per cent and the Arts Council 21 per cent (an increase of a third on last year), but beyond this directorial duty there is a sense of an active engagement with the character of the city.

He enjoys, in festival terms, the number and variety of venues it offers for programming. He agrees that Cork suffers from having too many temples and not enough Vestal Virgins, but seems intent on putting that right.

The venues suggest their uses: the Institute for Choreography and Dance at the Firkin Crane, for example, will be the starting point for Safe Harbour, a spectacle of music and dance designed by the American choreographer Martha Bowers, which will promenade onto the city quays below Shandon.

Corcadorca, the initiators of promenade performances in Cork, will use FitzGerald Park for A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the new Millennium Hall, Cork Corporation's expansion and remodelling of its concert and conference facilities at Eglinton Street, will host the "engineering cities" forum.

The programme for the festival, which runs from Tuesday until July 1st, is already long and crowded and includes the Belgrade Theatre's award-winning production of Roald Dahl's The Twits. The bid to be European city of culture is not part of the brief, but Turton has a missionary feeling for the city. "I'd hate it to become a place where everybody just disappears when the sun goes in. There has to be a core of enthusiastic, vibrant people living in it. People have to be held here, they have to be inspired by what's available to them." He has seen it happen in Galway. The participants in the national forum, which is co-presented by the National Sculpture Factory, will include Gavin; John Fitzgerald, Dublin's city manager; Joe Berridge of Urban Strategies Inc., a planning and urban-design firm based in Toronto; Frank McDonald of The Irish Times; Fred Manson, the head of the regeneration and environment department of Southwark Council in London; and Joanna Averley of Britain's Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment.

Beth Gali, a Spanish architect who is working on a significant new design for Patrick Street in Cork, will give an evening presentation on Monday, introduced by Neil Hegarty, Cork's city architect. Turton has high hopes for the lasting impact of the forum. "If Cork could get the right kind of investment, it could really open up. It could become one of the front-line cities of Europe. If you think of what Barcelona means for Spain, even though Madrid is the capital; Cork could be Ireland's Barcelona."

Designing Cities: A National Forum on the Value of Urban Design, presented by the National Sculpture Factory and Cork Midsummer Festival, is at Millennium Hall, Cork, on Tuesday June 26th, from 9 a.m. to 6p.m. Beth Gali's free public lecture is at the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery on Monday June 25th at 6 p.m.

Cork Midsummer Festival runs from Tuesday until July 1st (bookings on 021-4270022). Highlights are in The Ticket today