Brendan O'Sullivan, a chartered planner with a civil engineering and urban design background, was educated at UCC and the University of Edinburgh. A native of Cork city, he has more than twenty years' experience of urban and rural planning both in Ireland and abroad. He has also worked as a civil engineer with a UK consulting firm and spent two periods of overseas development work (in Sri Lanka and in The Gambia) as a planner and lecturer. In recent years he has headed up the Planning Policy Unit of Cork County Council which prepared the 2003 County Development Plan (the first major plan in Ireland under the 2000 Planning and Development Act.

Brendan was part of the working / steering groups on a range of major planning initiatives and has led multidisciplinary planning projects covering subjects such as coastal zone management, stakeholder dialogue, planning for wind energy, and technical training. He also has experience of managing EU funded planning projects (LIFE, OUVERTURE, ALTENER) including the Bantry Bay Coastal Zone Charter in 2000. Both the Charter and the 2003 Cork CDP were overall winners of the Irish National Planning Achievement Award.

His teaching and research interests include topics such as planning theory, evolution of settlement planning, mediation and consensus building in planning, landscape and planning, forward planning practice, the use of spatial planning data, planning in rural areas and planning in developing countries. He has been a member of the technical and Education Committe of the Irish Planning Institute, and visiting academic at the Department of Géoarchitecture at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest.

Brendan is also Senior Lecturer in the UCC Department of Geography.

My research interests cover a wide range of topics in the general field of urban, regional and spatial planning. Recent work has covered topics such as planning and landscape, the disciplinary identity of planning as a profession, spatial planning as a tool for metropolitan governance. I am also interested in cross disciplinary approaches to sustainable development, planning and urbanisation in the global south, planning history, planning theory, and international approaches to planning and sustainable development. A key focus is on the usefulness of planning research and evidence within the real world context of planning practice both in Ireland and abroad.