There is something about a boom that separates it from all other states of urban life - something difficult to identify when it is present, but all too obvious when it is gone. Today, Dublin is definitely experiencing a boom. The city is feverish and overcrowded, its traffic caught up in that terminal overlap between the last months of private car anarchy and the draconian counter-attack of the bus and cycle lanes. Meanwhile the skyline is punctuated by tower cranes more than ever before in the city's history. To an English visitor, Dublin is repeating, on a larger scale relative to its smaller size, the experience of London during the Thatcher years, when the promised deregulation of the financial services sector triggered a massive building boom. To anyone who remembers London in the mid-1980s, the similarity is uncanny.

There is the same sense of a city possessed by tremendous economic forces. The rules and regulations drawn up for the measured control of development in quieter times can no longer be made to fit. The forces of movement have seized the initiative and, on every side, there are indications that it is not time to pause, but rather to spring onto the back of the Celtic Tiger and ride, ride, ride. Fifteen years ago, just this kind of wild mixture of energy and excitement led to the transformation of London's Docklands, a process that really began when work started on the great 1.8 million square metre (19.4 million square feet) development at Canary Wharf. Today, it is not too much to say that this project, together with the new roads, railways, underground lines and airport that it subsequently drew into its ambit, was responsible for a shift in the centre of gravity of London.

Built two miles downriver from the Bank of England, the first phase of Canary Wharf, incorporating the then tallest office tower in Europe, not only stimulated matching development in the City of London, but opened up the space between the two for the first time. As a result, the old East End and the riverside boroughs of the Thames entered into an era of redevelopment that would otherwise have taken a century to achieve. It goes without saying that, even in boom times, such changes take time. In urban planning, as in education, every new scheme adopted means an old plan abandoned, and Canary Wharf was no exception. At its inception, the very idea of its ultimate total of 1.8 million square metres of state-of-the-art, large-floor-plate office towers was opposed by virtually every regulatory body except the London Docklands Development Corporation and the government and by all the conservation bodies and almost the entire architectural profession.

In their view, the scheme was out of scale with its surroundings and in the wrong place, "ruining the view from Greenwich Park." It was seen as "too tall", "too big" and "too American". But then, measures to raise the scale of a city call for tremendous stamina. Indeed it is only now, 10 years after the completion of the first phase, with the second and third phases on site and 10,000 jobs already created, that Canary Wharf has finally become the enterprise showcase of Tony Blair's New Labour government.

AND so to Dublin, where the controversy surrounding the proposed 575,000 square metre Spencer Dock development - the largest planning application ever laid before Dublin Corporation for the largest brownfield site in Ireland - seems in so many ways to be following the course charted by Canary Wharf. Like the Wharf, the Dock is a mixed use project for a vast waterfront site that is now largely derelict. Like the Wharf, the Dock has been conceived as a complete urban precinct with housing as well as offices and civic amenities. It will have no less than 7,300 car-parking spaces and some tall buildings (though by no means as tall as the tallest at Canary Wharf). Instead, it consists of state-of-the-art large commercial office floor plates, a university technology centre, 500 hotel bedrooms, numerous retail outlets, 3,000 apartments, a carefully designed public open square, a canalside linear park, a new railway station and restored listed buildings.

More to the point as regards its prospects of success is the fact that, like Canary Wharf again, Spencer Dock betrays the influence of North American urban design. Its master plan and all its individual buildings have been, or will be designed by the American firm of Roche Dinkeloo & Associates, whose senior partner, Irish-born Kevin Roche, is a Pritzker prize winner and American Institute of Architects Gold Medallist with many years of highly regarded experience in the field of corporate architecture and urban design. Kevin Roche's special position as an Irish national with a strong international reputation is the key to the popular acceptability as well as the architectural credibility of the Spencer Dock project, just as the galaxy of stars assembled by the original developers was for the success of Canary Wharf. But the financial lynch-pin of the Dublin enterprise is Roche's competition-winning design for the £15 million National Conference Centre (NCC), which will take pride of place on the 21-hectare site. An epic structure dominated by a vast inclined glass cylinder, the importance of this building to the current planning application for the first phase of the work is impossible to overstate. In addition to its urbane but assertive design, it represents an unique departure from common practice in the construction of major public buildings by being paid for completely, and indefinitely subsidised, by the developers, with the public sector contribution limited to a single £26 million EU grant.

Like the status of Roche as master planner and architect, this act of faith in the city elevates the status of the project. Critics who carp at the large amount of supporting accommodation called for by the developers, fall silent at the thought of losing the NCC without it. In the same way, critics who complain that they do not yet know what all the supporting buildings will look like, are given pause by Kevin Roche's standing in the architectural firmament. In Dublin, in return for planning permission for 575,000 sq m of lettable accommodation, the Spencer Dock consortium is offering to underwrite the construction cost and lifetime operating losses of the NCC, as well as providing a combined heat and power generating station and a rail station as part of a future high-speed link to the airport. It is the convention in conservative architectural circles to deplore large plans and periods of rapid development. Planners and academics shake their heads as the number of planning applications and appeals increases, the number of controversies rises, and the helter-skelter of economic opportunity takes command. But history shows us that it is in such times that great things can be done. The reclamation of docks derelict for a century; the completion of a motorway network; the extension and connection of light and heavy railways. In short the ratcheting up of the scale of a city, so that it faces its future as well as protecting its past.

THE Spencer Dock project is just such an opportunity, its very "Americanism" evidence not of a clumsy rejection of "European" scale, but of a sure grasp of the needs of a city of the future, giving Dublin a model for tomorrow. Some weeks ago, the Spencer Dock planning application was fielded by Dublin Corporation with a request for further information. Now that information has been supplied. From the date of its delivery at the beginning of June a further 60 days may elapse before a determination is made. Depending on that decision, an appeals process may or may not begin, and its proceedings may continue far into next year. All the more important then that the issue should not lose itself in the minutiae of details.

For it is entirely appropriate that in this time of prosperity, when the city is becoming a vibrant new metropolis straining at its old seams, bursting out of a street pattern close to gridlock, hunkered down around its magnificent Georgian quarter - yet still with no acceptable access to its own airport - that all Dublin's ambitions should be expressed one way or another in a single planning application, the largest in the history of the State. Appropriate too that this application should be judged against the aspirations of Ireland's new millennium, and not only against the conventions laid down by its meritorious architectural past.

Martin Pawley is a writer on architectural subjects. He was for many years architecture critic of the Guardian. His most recent books are Theory and Design in the Second Machine Age and Terminal Architecture.