Planning applications to Dublin's four planning authorities have been remarkably robust throughout August despite the traditional holiday period and the reported hiatus in the economy.

The current planning files in D·n Laoghaire-Rathdown, Fingal and South Dublin contain as many large scale developments, if not more, than some of the earlier months of the year.

Whether this is just that the slowdown has not yet filtered through the backlog of projects on developers' drawing boards will ultimately be tested by how many of the successful projects get built over the next two year.

However, one particularly robust sector appears to be the development of apartments and new homes, with a number of large scale applications surfacing in the last month.

Included is an application from the Ritz Consortium with an address at Barrow Street, Grand Canal Dock, Dublin, for 343 apartments at Station Road, Portmarnock, one of the more affluent areas of the northside.

The developers are seeking permission to demolish an existing habitable dwelling and develop the apartments in six blocks ranging from two to four storeys with penthouse levels, a 1,765 m sq commercial block including a management and security suite, together with 427 parking spaces at ground and basement level.

The six apartment blocks are to contain 24 two-bedroom penthouses, 299 two-bedroom apartments and 20 one-bedroom apartments.

It will be complemented by new traffic calming arrangements, landscaping and parking for 277 cars, 150 of which will be in a central sub-basement car park.

There will also be 12 refuse stores and an electricity sub-station. The development is to be surrounded with railings, gates and retaining walls.

Across the city at Cabinteely on a 4.6 hectare site to the rear and south of Brennanstown Road and rear and west of the Old Bray Road, an application has been made to D·n Laoghaire Rathdown County Council for construction of 230 homes by Tudor Homes Ltd.

The proposal consists of 104 units in two four-storey plus penthouse apartment blocks, which include 36 one-bedroom apartments, 48 apartments with two bedrooms and 20 three- bedroom units.

There will also be 54 units in two four-storey apartments and duplex buildings. These latter homes will consist of 18 two-bedroom ground floor apartments, 18 two-bedroom first floor apartments and 18 three-bedroom duplex units.

The remainder of the development will include 32 units in two three-storey apartments and duplex buildings. These will be 16 two-bedroom ground floor units, and 16 three-bed duplex units.

The apartments will all be arranged around a central courtyard enclosing a landscaped open space. A total of 309 car-parking spaces will service the development, 209 of the spaces at surface level and 100 spaces underground.

Communal amenity open space will be provided with bin storage areas and bicycle storage facilities. In addition, 28 two-storey houses with developed attic space are proposed for the west of the site and 12 three-storey houses are proposed for the north. These houses will have front and rear gardens with on-site parking.

Permission is also sought for the demolition of an existing house at Mullaghcarton on the Old Bray Road to form a new vehicular access with new entrance piers and walls and new vehicular entrance road to the site, and for site works-associated with the development.

Commercial developments too, are still featuring strongly in the lists. One such application from Rossfield Properties Ltd, with an address at Orchard House, Main St, Rathfarnham, was for an enterprise centre at Rosemount Business Park, in Blanchardstown.

The proposal seeks alterations to an existing permission for 18 enterprise centre units. The alterations to the internal layouts to the units include addition first floor office space and change in use of ground floor industrial and office use alongside miscellaneous elevation alterations.

The appearance of an enterprise centre on the edge of the city may well be symptomatic of what academics and environmental commentators have called the "edge city", a conglomeration of industrial development along the M50 whose workforce lives as far away as the North.

Such a scenario has implications in planning terms for the sustainability of the inner city and the use of key inter-urban roads, and this is one area which is expected to be addressed in the Government's forthcoming National Spatial Strategy; the public consultation period for the strategy is to begin this autumn.