Sarah Wigglesworth Architects has been hired to draw up plans to transform the former Livesey Museum for Children in south London into a new base for a community theatre.

Wilkinson Eyre, HOK International and Swedish firm White Arkitekter BV are among the five firms shortlisted to redevelop fire-ravaged Southend Pier.

Edward Cullinan Architects’ new visitor centre at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh includes a host of green features such as wind turbine and rainwater collection.

Zaha Hadid’s Burnham Pavilion in Chicago has finally opened to the public after weeks of delay.

John Thompson & Partners is among six designers shortlisted in the competition to design the Welsh Passive House.

The RIBA has welcomed the creation of Chief Adviser on Construction, dubbed the “construction tsar”.

Board members of The Lighthouse, the Scottish centre for architecture and design, have put the centre into adminstration.

Purcell Miller Tritton has won a commission for a Lewis Carroll Interpretation Centre, to be built at the Cheshire church where the Alice in Wonderland author was born.

Levels of optimism among architects about the future of the industry are holding steady, according to the latest RIBA trends survey.

We seem to have relapsed into the asinine stylistic debate of the 80s. It should be about what we build, for whom and why

This summer's hullabaloo over the Prince of Wales's latest architectural interventions may be seen as good, knockabout silly season stuff, and yet it is also depressing. Why? Because all this chatter takes us back 25 years to an evening at Hampton Court Palace, when the prince gave his famous "carbuncle" speech and drove an artificial divide between those who would turn the tide of progress back and those who believe in the notion of progress.

For some while, it looked as if the heir to the throne had piped down, and that the ping pong battle between regal classicists and republican modernists was the stuff of dim and distant 80s history. But it has all come back with the squabble over the redevelopment of Chelsea Barracks, and with the prince's attempts to replace architects here – Lord Rogers – and, elsewhere, in a big and shiny development in front of St Paul's Cathedral – Jean Nouvel – with his own drawing-board courtiers.

Whatever the truths, half-truths and untruths of these latest revelations, and however strongly some architects may feel that the prince is subverting the planning process, it is profoundly sad, and downright annoying, to see architectural debate, and discussion over the future of our towns and cities, reduced to this kind of penny dreadful lark.

Architecture and the way we nurture, or undermine, our cities are far more important matters than squabbles over style. Over the past quarter of a century, British architects have developed any number of successful approaches to the formal design of buildings, while engineers have evolved intriguing, inventive and economical ways of making new buildings stand, stretch and even sing for structural joy. Where we have failed our architecture, our cities, our old market towns, villages, and ourselves is in what we have asked these professionals to design for us. Our pitiful, and pitiless, greed has long got the better of us.

Just look at the £500m One New Change office and shopping mall complex rising beside St Paul's. The architect happens to be Nouvel, who has designed such inspired Parisian buildings as the Institut du Monde Arabe (1987) and Fondation Cartier (1994). And, yet, it would hardly matter if Richard Rogers, Quinlan Terry, Zaha Hadid, Antoni Gaudi, Le Corbusier, Michelangelo or Albert Speer had been asked to design this bloated commercial conceit. One New Change is a development too far. Why can't we just say a firm "no" to such schemes, and build what head and heart know to be good?

One New Change has been a particularly sorry project, because it involved the gratuitous demolition of a building designed and built in an elegant and courteous manner, with respect to St Paul's, in the 1950s. Its destruction was architecturally insensitive and environmentally wasteful.

Throughout Britain, much the same thing is happening. Most new housing is mean-spirited junk. Councils approve ecologically damaging, culturally dim and wholly unnecessary supermarkets in independent market towns knowing that this means changing them forever, and in a deleterious manner. Vast tracts of land are claimed in the name of "regeneration" only to be given over to crass blocks of "luxury" flats, fashionable shopping malls and anything but civic buildings and valued public spaces.

So, a debate about contemporary architecture and planning should be more earthy and everyday, and yet more profound than one about royalists v republicans, or faux-classicism v ruthlessly commercial modernism. It should be about what we build, for whom and why. It should be about working for the very best, whether in the design and planning of homes, schools, hospitals, town and city centres. We have, though, a major problem on our hands. Since the demise of local authority architect-planners throughout most of Britain, decision-making over minor and major planning issues has been centralised, bureaucratised or quangoed.

More than ever, because of the sheer scale and interconnected complexity of modern development, we need first rate architect-engineer-planners working at a local level throughout the country. We need to train a new generation of such people to question questionable building projects, while promoting and encouraging appropriate, well built and even beautiful and heart-warming architecture, of whatever style.

We need a process at national and local level where we can consider what we are about to build before we set the concrete mixers churning. It is no good trying to assess the design quality of inappropriate schemes. There is no such process at the moment. Government – New Labour or Conservative makes no difference – has little real concern for architecture and planning. Housing ministers come and go like the latest vogue in hemlines, while there have been no fewer than nine ministers holding the construction portfolio since 2001.

Continuity, a sense of purpose, and a collective desire to build thoughtfully can come about. Such issues, though, should not be left to the vagaries of the free market, nor to local councillors, civil servants and ministers without proper briefing. For now, though, it appears as if we have returned to the asinine stylistic debates of the 1980s, leaving truly long-term, joined-up, humane thinking on where and how we live, and our buildings, to happenstance, short- term government managerialism, simple greed and ding-dong, you smell, no you smell, debate.