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A crumbling art deco apartment block designed to resemble the Queen Mary is one of the glories of England's south coast. Iain Sinclair is seduced by its faded charms

Just before 7am on the morning of 20 July 2010, a number of passengers disembark from a beached concrete liner and shuffle through the shallows of St Leonards-on-Sea, to foregather and huddle, as with all nautical disasters, while they wait for the lifeboat. Which arrives in the form of a world-weary charabanc. They are head-counted, eased into tight slots for the bumpy ride down the coast to Newhaven. Where they will clamber aboard the MV Balmoral for a day's voyage to Tower Bridge, by way of Beachy Head.

As they put out into a glassy sea, familiar topographical markers are set aside. A steward, staggering to balance a tray of liquid refreshment and burger refills for the captain, tells an inquirer that Canvey Island is Tilbury. Every time we steer in close enough to inspect a natural wonder – the white cliffs of Dover or the Dungeness nuclear power station – our vessel tilts, alarmingly, as 650 cameras whirr and click. Seen from the shore, it must seem a miracle that we stay afloat. The crowded deck is like an out-take from Otto Preminger's Exodus. Quayside at Newhaven, embarkation feels like evolution going into reverse, primitive life forms rushing back to the ocean. Standing room only, queues for the breakfast bar snaking up the stairs and twice round the deck. The recklessly abandoned St Leonards boat-building, on the other hand, its design based on the Queen Mary, has plenty of room for a decayed first class of freeholders, with an ever-shifting ballast of rentals in steerage, tucked away in the old servants' quarters at the rear.

Marine Court looks big enough to rehouse Hackney. Superstructure burdened with a forest of radio masts and photovoltaic scanners, this prewar monster looms over the remnants of James Burton's 1820s colonnades, at a slight angle, like a stack of dirty plates from a wedding breakfast in the Royal Victoria hotel. You can picture the unstable reef tilting in the wind, which surges around shops embedded in its hull with enough force to repel retirees at the window of the showroom where they stock an infinite variety of furniture to die in. Marine Court, which should never have been given a berth, stealing light from steep hillside terraces, has the dignity of an old circus elephant. With the passage of time, it has become a geological feature. And one of the glories of the south coast.

The only other such building in the world, a luxury hotel based on the Queen Mary's competitor in the blue-ribbon Atlantic trade, the SS Normandie, is to be found in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Fringed by trees, proud against a permanently blue sky, the sleek curves of the hotel and the dazzling whiteness of its balconies demonstrate everything Marine Court is not; but what, with care (and serious investment), it could become. The Normandie hotel, in streamline moderne style, was conceived by the engineer Félix Benítez as a loving tribute to his French wife, Moineau, whom he met, in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers fashion, on an ocean voyage. The rival concrete liners were launched at the same moment, 1938. The Normandie hotel accrued the glamour of a Cuban resort for high-rollers out of The Godfather, while Marine Court, undone by war, boarded by pirates, declined into a set for The Shining. A haunted hangar in which to house a crazed writer, hammering out the same sentence, over and over, while he waits to join the undead in a decommissioned cocktail bar.

A good scattering of Marine Courters were aboard the Balmoral that morning. I had never seen so many in one place. On winter stays in the building, I encountered no other human presence: antique grille-fronted lifts groaned, furred pipes complained. Hot water resisted every inch of the way to chromium-plated bathrooms. Endless corridors, viewed through diamond-shaped portholes, were low-lit and unpeopled – at least by anything you could see or touch. Monitor screens in the mirrored lobby, with its chequerboard floor, played back drifts of aquarium light. Panels were as blank as if wiped by a vampire. An occasional porter, left over from another era, creaked through, with a nod and a tug at the cuffs of a threadbare uniform.

I was frozen in my tracks by the approach of a figure in black T-shirt and baggy tracksuit bottoms, up there on the monitor screen: a memory-spectre, from an erased chapter of my life, come back from the aether. I hadn't set eyes on Ranald Graham since our student days in Dublin, 40 years before. His flat, at the top of the building, was insulated in unshelved countercultural paperbacks and olive-green copies of Paris-published Burroughs. Along with mounds of plays and film scripts, made and unmade. There had been an afterlife, so he explained, of television production, The Sweeney, Dempsey and Makepeace, strategically funded programmers in Hong Kong. There were adventures in Hollywood too, including the screenplay for William Castle's last film, Shanks, made in 1974 and generally acknowledged as the weirdest project ever to emerge from a major studio. The white-face mime Marcel Marceau plays a dual role, as a scientist trying to reanimate dead animals and a puppeteer assisting with the experiments. The puppeteer releases zombies to jerk and twitch on missions of vengeance. After that, there was nowhere to go. Except Marine Court. The ship of fools where lost souls are always welcome.

Ranald was gregarious, a lovely teller of tales. He took an active part in the gambling school, predicting football scores, at £2 a hit, in the minimart on the corner. And he nursed the ambition to complete the ultimate horror script, the one he had been cooking for so many years. He was hammering at his laptop when he heard a rap at the window. A figure, naked to the waist, punctured by needles like a refugee from Hellraiser, stared in at him. And beckoned. He roared, he rushed. The barefoot man lurched away into the darkness. He was the living proof of my conviction that this building incubates narrative. Stories tell us, not us them, while we listen to the drag of pebbles on the tide, and become absorbed in the great fact of the English Channel. But there was a rational explanation for the spook at his window. A poor creature, suffering and medicated, in another flat on another floor, had become disorientated, and was roaming the balconies trying to find a safe door.

The accidental fraternity of Marine Court, gathering on the deck of the Balmoral, like Aleister Crowley's coven up on the ridge in Hastings, were drawn together. We were there for a reason. We had the powerful atavistic urge to view our concrete liner from the sea, to achieve a reverse angle that would confer on the peeling leviathan the gravitas it deserved. Distance, in this case, was time. From seven miles out, as we stared at the hazy coastline from alongside the Royal Sovereign lighthouse, Marine Court shone with the brilliance of its launch as a modernist fantasy, a pleasure palace conceived in the spirit of Agatha Christie. With art deco restaurants, tea rooms, Turkish baths and "fittings worthy of a West End mansion".

Kevin, who rented a flat in the building and who loved everything about it, introduced himself. He carried digital equipment with which to assemble, as he confessed, a feature-length account of our voyage. His camera privileged Marine Court in a way denied to the human eye. It became what it had ceased to be in the real world, a paradigm of south-coast regeneration; a 600ft, 13-storey wonder. Kevin explained that he tended to stay indoors, on his balcony, after work. He was a big man and too many of the street folk of London Road knew him from his day job as a security guard at Morrisons. One enterprising local had been captured with 12 bottles of Baileys secreted inside his overcoat.

Experiencing a temporary estrangement from Hackney, I walked around the coast, in the opposite direction to the Balmoral, to search for a place that would fire my imagination. After Whitstable, Margate, Deal, Dover, Pevensey Bay, Eastbourne and Brighton, I gave it up. Until the photographer Effie Paleologou invited me down to Hastings for a talk she was giving about a commission, to depict the town at night. Like Ranald Graham, she stumbled into a landscape of astonishing eccentrics, whispering voices hungry for the right ventriloquist. The beauty of the thing was that she absorbed all this, without patronage or exploitation, and produced a series of exquisitely graded minimalist prints, with not a breath of human interference. A leakage of sour neon against dying natural light. She led our group on a walk through the flower-dressed alleys of the Old Town. Characterful houses were still to be had at modest prices. This quarter, and some of its denizens, twinned with the Hampstead of the 1960s. St Leonards, a mile or so to the west, and a much more comfortable fit, was Hackney-on-Sea. Asylum seekers and economic migrants, in melancholy limbo, sat on the pebbles or hitched themselves to the rail, while they waited for bad news. I saw, with a sense of awful inevitability, a photograph of Marine Court.

A cursory viewing was enough, the way that you could lie in bed with nothing but sea and sky outside the window, through that CinemaScope frame of rusting rails. It was going to be tough to live up to the challenge of the wraparound view, angular balconies and curved decks. The promenade running away to the funland arcades, the fishermen's huts like extended sentry boxes. With a roar of Nietzschean overdrive, the concrete superliner of Marine Court was topped out and ready for the champagne bottle in 1938, two years after work had begun. The promotional brochure was a silver-stamped work of art. It referred to our building as a "Hymn to the Sun".

As with the trip on the Balmoral, the brochure speaks of anchoring a mile from shore, to appreciate how the dominant features of the bay were now the Norman castle and Marine Court. Properties left over from the original (and decaying) Burton estate were acquired by an astute estate agent, Commander Bray. The borough engineer Sidney Little had the vision of a concrete city, a marine metropolis, stretching from Hastings to Bexhill, with the boat-building of architects Kenneth Dalgleish and Roger Pullen as the flagship. The promenade made a chain of visual connections between underpasses, shelters, sunken gardens and the spectacular Olympic-size lido at Bulverhythe. Sensuous railway posters celebrated this English Riviera, its bathing beauties and lotus eaters basking in sun lounges below Marine Court. Within a year, the dream was over. The developer had been carried away, as were so many others, by the concept of a beached cruise liner: the suspension of time and dissolution of space. Residential take-up was disappointing. The developers folded with debts of £333,000 (at a period when a pleasant three-bed semi in the town could be had for £750).

War was declared. Marine Court was requisitioned, to be occupied by airmen and cypher clerks. A German fighter-bomber, seeing it as a legitimate target, blew away three floors at the prow. Sidney Little's underground car parks now looked like an anticipation of bunker architecture. The rest of the story is showroom, casino, Witch Doctor disco, unexplained fires, drug rehabilitation unit. Subterranean space was rented to a Nigerian pastor-solicitor, Michael Adelasoye, who was later found guilty of involvement in helping to arrange 383 sham marriages. Adelasoye operated in partnership with a Ukrainian man extradited from Sweden for drug offences and a local vicar with a large church and a very small congregation.

At first, there were regular refits and paint jobs; by the time of the new millennium, Marine Court was crumbling away. Managing agents declared themselves bankrupt. Services collapsed. One lady, driven to the point of breakdown, turned on her taps and left them running, until all the water in the building's system was drained. A brave and determined group decided to apply for enfranchisement, to take over the freehold. After a protracted series of court battles, they succeeded.

The old Marine Court magic, despite all evidence to the contrary, is happening again: an onboard democracy based on unreasoning love. Street-level shops are active once more and catering to incomers. The building is no elegant Bauhaus translation, but a steampunk generator of nautical fantasies. I smiled when the man in the curry house, under the canopy, told me that Lord Longford was a regular and that the Walker Brothers were always dropping in. Then he produced the album. And here they are, with poppadoms and Cobra lager, snapped by the ship's photographer. Late immortals comfortably settled in a corner for the cruise that never ends.

English Heritage is running an exhibition, with guided walks, on the history of Marine Court at the Burton Gallery, Marine Court, St Leonards-on-Sea from 10-12 September. theburtongallery.co.uk

With the opening of the Taj Cape Town, will the city prove the broken windows theory of urban decay?

The broken windows theory of urban decay first appeared in the magazine The Atlantic in 1982. Social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling proposed that little problems, such as broken windows, can soon become big ones – squatting, vandalism and violent crime.

It's been a seductive idea ever since: that fixing windows, picking up litter and scrubbing graffiti are snowflakes that can trigger an avalanche of regeneration, returning middle classes and Starbucks all round.

In South Africa's great cities, the fight is on. Johannesburg has developments in unfashionable areas, such as the boutique shops of 44 Stanley Avenue and the creative hub Arts on Main. I recently witnessed the opening of 12 Decades, the city's first "art hotel" in a renovated building deep in the urban underbelly. Each room takes a decade of Johannesburg's history as its theme; one has apartheid legislation printed in the toilet bowl.

A decade ago Cape Town city centre was seen by many as a no-go area: daylight muggings, boarded-up buildings and parking attendants on the make. More than a few windows have been repaired since then, and last weekend there was more evidence of renaissance: the opening of a five-star hotel.

The Taj Cape Town is a sister of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, recently reopened after the 2008 terrorist attacks. It brings Indian decor and "refined Indian hospitality", and a spin-off of London's Bombay Brasserie, to a once unfriendly corner of the Mother City.

As in the US, city centres tend to be more dynamic, beautifully ugly and historically evocative than the safe but bland suburbs. The 177-room Taj Cape Town has plenty of ghosts, as it occupies the former premises of the South African Reserve Bank (1932) and Temple Chambers (1896), combined with a newly constructed tower.

Adapting old buildings is one short cut to character. Much of the original banking hall is intact, with its carved clock, sash windows and grand chandelier. Up high are the two balconies where minstrels entertained customers as they queued to make their deposits or withdrawals.

In the roof is a curved skylight made with scientific precision: in 1929 the architect James Morris bullied the astronomer royal into measuring the position of shadows month by month so he could maximise the amount of direct sunlight in the hall.

This was a gilded age, after all, up to a point. There are four columns that were originally meant to be made of marble imported from Sweden, but after a court case and an outcry from taxpayers, the architect settled for cheaper Portuguese Styros marble in cream and brown.

I was among American, Australian, European and Indian journalists invited to the hotel's grand opening last weekend. We had been promised an appearance by Jacob Zuma, who had been over the road at St George's Cathedral, but the president was a no-show, possibly fearful that cutting ribbons at luxury hotels would jar with striking nurses and teachers.

From a marquee, we walked up a red carpet, through the old bank's giant bronze gates and local Paarl granite facade. The crowd of faces was mainly white or Indian with a small black minority. There was a speech from Ratan Tata, the Indian tycoon whose Tata Group owns the Taj hotels, about India's affinity with South Africa and references to Gandhi and Mandela.

I stood with American and Indian journalists, musing on the significance of this Indian initiative. "There's a sense in the US that our best days are behind us," said the American. "The 20th century was the American century, but now we're in the Asian century with China and India. It looks fairly inevitable."

Among the guests was Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, which has led the renewal campaign. He took us on a guided tour of the immediate neighbourhood, one of the most historically rich in South Africa.

People have been living in this region for at least 70,000 years – it's one of the oldest areas of human settlement on the planet. At least two millennia ago, the Khoisan and Khoikhoi people would bring their livestock to what they called Camissa (place of sweet water).

The sun rose and the sun set and nothing changed, making it easy to pretend they were alone in the universe. Then one day the aliens came.

The Dutch East India Company set up a refreshment station and began taxing the indigenious people. And so centuries of conflict over water and land began here.

The company set up a lodge where it is believed that up to 9,000 slaves, convicts and mentally ill people were held between 1679 and 1811. The building later became the Cultural History Museum, which in apartheid terms meant white cultural history. Black culture was put in the Natural History Museum.

Just a few minutes' walk away is a public artwork that commemorates the day in 1989 when police fired a water cannon with purple dye at pro-democracy protesters so they could identify and arrest them. One demonstrator leapt on to the vehicle and seized the cannon, turning it on to the police and National Party headquarters. Later a piece of graffiti declared: "The purple shall govern."

Parliament, the 350-year-old Company's Garden, the National Gallery, the South African Museum and numerous other sites are all within walking distance. I ambled around St George's, where Desmond Tutu once rallied the faithful against apartheid, and thought myself back in England amid the carved pews, stained glass and stone effigies.

The memorials on the wall speak of brief lives: "Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth. In memory of Adriaan Carl Johannes Bouwer, aged 16, Sunday school teacher, whose life of good promise was cut short by a fatal fall on Table Mountain, September 27th 1883, on the eve of the cathedral confirmation, September 29th. Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip not, Psalm 17:5."

Another reads: "In memory of Montague Treby Molesworth, lieutenant in the Royal Navy, who died on board HMS Cleopatra March 25th 1844, of spear wounds received on the 23rd in an unforeseen and general attack made by the natives of the west coast of Madagascar on the unarmed crew of the Pinnace under his command while actively engaged in weighing the anchor of their ship ...

"In this barbrous outrage, the work of two minutes, and result of a defeated attempt at theft, seven out of 13 brave men lost their lives with their gallant officer. Thus was his bright career arrested ere 24 summers had dawned upon him, yet in that brief space, he had proved himself by his prowess and presence of mind in the moment of danger all a British sailor should be."

The Taj Cape Town hotel is on Wale Street, Cape Town, South Africa.

Royal Shakespeare Theatre will open after three and a half years with major facelift, better seating and more ladies' loos

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose doors have been closed for three and a half years for a £112.8m refurbishment, will reopen this November. When it does, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director, Michael Boyd, the revamped theatre will provide "the best auditorium for performing Shakespeare anywhere".

For Shakespeare fans, the facelift is long overdue. The old theatre was locally nicknamed "the jam factory" for its industrial appearance, while an unsightly car park ruined its handsome 1930s frontage by architect Elisabeth Scott. "It was," said Rab Bennetts of Bennetts Associates, the architectural practice that has overseen the redevelopment, "a hostile building that turned its back on the town".

And that was before you got inside: some seats were as far as 37 metres away from the stage – a distance that has now halved. The "furthest seat" will remain in situ, in a spot now part of the restaurant, as a reminder of the bad old days.

Female members of the audience, in particular, will have cause to rejoice come November: the number of ladies' lavatories has increased from 19 to 47.

Best of all, the redevelopment will come in on time and on budget, according to Boyd. There is £5m yet to raise, but Vikki Heywood, the RSC's executive director, said she was confident it would come in the next five months from "individuals and charitable trusts to whom we have been talking for a while".

The new theatre, with its high running costs, will open at a time of cuts to public funding of the arts which could be as deep as 25%. Though it is recruiting for jobs with the new theatre, the RSC has frozen pay for existing staff. Boyd said he was hoping the new shop, restaurant, cafe and bar would all provide revenue.

The main theatre and the smaller stage, the Swan, will open to the public from 24 November for visits and one-off events including a version of Shakespeare's sonnets by the director Peter Brook, who created some of his most celebrated productions for the RSC between 1950 and 1970.

In February, full-scale performances will start, with revivals of Rupert Goold's production of Romeo and Juliet, and David Farr's King Lear, with Greg Hicks in the title role. At the Swan, the Irish cabaret singer Camille O'Sullivan will perform a new version of Shakespeare's poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Meanwhile, the temporary auditorium, the Courtyard Theatre, will still be up and running. Opening there in November will be a new musical, Matilda, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story. Its book is by playwright Dennis Kelly, with lyrics and music by the comic and musician Tim Minchin.

The first large-scale new work to appear on the 1,000-seat main stage from the spring will be announced in November, when the company finalises plans for its 50th anniversary from April 2011 onwards. Aside from (of course) Shakespeare, Boyd said the company would restage some of the plays the company has commissioned over its half-century, mentioning in particular founding director Peter Hall's affinity with the late Harold Pinter.

Boyd said he thought Matilda, A Musical "might have legs, and we hope it will". A show in the West End and even on Broadway would significantly help the RSC through a period of austerity.

In addition, said Boyd, the theatre would "celebrate things that screen art cannot: the desire to witness and share a gathering of a community in real space and real time. And it achieves three dimensions in a way that Hollywood is desperately trying to achieve. We have 3D in our bones."

From barely there buildings to ethereal cloud walks, the Venice Biennale is where architects go to dream

Riding the interminably slow accelerato waterbus to the Venice Architecture Biennale gave me time to stare afresh at the rows of theatrical houses and palaces on parade along the banks of the Grand Canal. If, in your mind's eye, you strip away the flamboyant gothic and Renaissance facades, you are left with rows of four-square brick boxes with big chimneys sitting by the water's edge under the vast skies, which did so much to make Turner's reputation as a visionary artist when he painted them. What you have, then, is a city that represent the four elements: earth (bricks), air (sky), fire (chimneys) and water (canal).

Unconsciously, this was more or less the theme of the 2010 Biennale. In an era of financial paucity and increasing concerns about the sensational waste of our capitalist world, its ever bigger buildings and ever more sprawling cities, I had the feeling that many architects from around the world are trying to get back to basics. Not, that is, to lead us into some austere era of rudimentary design and construction, but to help us think of how we can truly do more with less.

The biennale has been curated by Kazuyo Sejima, one half of the Pritzker prize-winning Japanese practice Sanaa. Given that Sanaa specialise in a form of architecture that might be called ethereal – buildings of great transparency, such as the new Rolex Learning Centre in Lausanne, that touch the ground as lightly as possible – this idea of doing more with less, and delightfully so, makes sense. Sejima has named this year's exhibition People Meet in Architecture, which, of course, they do. Yet she seems to be asking what this architecture might be if only it weren't such a slave, as it is at the moment, to overwhelming commercial forces.

The 12th International Architecture exhibition (the first was held in 1980) is a panoramic snapshot showing what architects around the world are thinking beyond and aside from the everyday concerns they have with satisfying clients and wooing planning committees. Held in the Arsenale – the one-time hub of the imperial Venetian navy – and the formal exhibition gardens overlooking the lagoon five minutes' walk away, the Biennale aims to encourage fresh thinking about architecture at a time of economic restraint, environmental fears and yet limitless opportunities. Here, in the dreamiest of all cities, is a rare chance for architects to dream and play, as well as address matter-of-fact issues of how we should be building at the moment. As Sejima said at the opening of the show, "an architecture exhibition is a challenging concept, as actual buildings cannot be exhibited". She continued: "As an architect, I feel it's a part of our profession to use space as a medium to express our thoughts. In this way, the atmosphere of the exhibition will be reached through multiple viewpoints rather than through a single orientation. It's a backdrop for people to relate to architecture, for architecture to relate to people, and for people to relate to themselves."

As if to underline this theme, when I walked into the massive Corderie, the old ropeworks buildings of the Arsenale – where one half of the sprawling biennial exhibition is on show – a team of Japanese architects was busy building a house that was barely there.

They were, they said, "thinking of architecture in the air", whereby "even the structures that give a building its very shape may no longer be clear but, rather, voidlike". I see. Or, rather, I didn't, as the house Junya Ishigami and his colleagues were building is made of what appears to be the finest steel threads. Design drawings of the house on the walls of the ropeworks were so fine as to be all but impossible to interpret. It was as if these diligent architects were building one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities, shaping a structure that might or might not be real.

The fantastical cities which Calvino imagined in Invisible Cities were a homage to Venice itself; the least likely of all cities, fictional or real. Ishigami's installation, Architecture as Air, is a riposte to the idea of building ourselves into a hell of our own making. I like the fact that this house has precise measurements – 14 x 4 x 4 metres – as if it might be built for real, and that it has a structure comprising columns, beams and bracing. Yet these are "indeterminate contours lacking true physical form that dissolve into the transparent space rather than structures supporting the building". At one point, it all threatened to fall down.

Next door is an installation called Cloudscapes by Tetsuo Kondo Architects and Matthias Schuler of Transsolar Klima Engineering. Here, visitors walk up the most delicate steel ramps into artificially generated clouds. This has been done before – notably on the banks of Lake Neuchâtel during the 2002 Swiss Expo by the New York architects Diller + Scofidio – yet there is something delightfully otherworldly in walking with your head in the clouds inside a building. All that is solid melts into water vapour, while architectural preconceptions fumble into a foggy state of indeterminancy. Anything might go.

As if to address this feeling, in another room in the Corderie Serpentine Gallery, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has installed a plethora of video screens on which you can sit and watch and listen to ideas about the future from all the Biennale's participants. Or, you can simply gawp at the scintillating, stroboscopic beauty of the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson's Your Split Second House, a cavernous, dark space in which whip-cracks and writhing snakes of water flash in front of your eyes, hinting at thrilling structures that could never really be, and are gone before your eyes even begin to adjust to their uncertain forms.

These installations – clouds, invisible houses, ephemeral structures – are, I think, successful. Whatever practical relevance they have on the future of what we build is not really their point; they are things of beauty, or ways of making us see with wide-open eyes. What might architecture, and the spaces it shapes and cossets, be like if we could only think about it freely?

A team of Spanish architects, engineers and musicians led by Antón García-Abril and Ensamble Studio suggest it's all a matter of balance; to this effect, they have installed two enormous interecting concrete I-beams across an entire room of the Corderie. These appear to be held in check by a rock and a coil spring, suggesting that the line we walk between self-destruction and a positive future is both delicate and dramatic.

In recent Biennales, curators have been been unable to resist the temptation to create exhibition rooms that feel more like the inside of dense academic tomes (indigestible in the Venetian heat) than installations with immediate visual impact. This year, the idea of creating strong yet simple themes and messages has been carried through from the Arsenale to the Giardini, the public park overlooking the lagoon and the lido, well away from the crowds of St Mark's Square.

This is where many of the national pavilions are found, waving flags for the architectural thinking of countries that have been involved with cultural events in Venice for many decades. Those with a more youthful involvement, whether Croatia or Bahrain, Chile or Korea, peddle their cultural wares in the Arsenale.

The Biennale's Golden Lion award for the best national pavilion has been presented to the Kingdom of Bahrain for a display of three simple fishermen's huts uprooted from the coast of Bahrain for the duration of the Venice show. Entitled Reclaim and curated by architects Noura Al-Sayeh and Fuad Al-Ansari, this is a touching display of a vernacular culture fast disappearing in a part of the world where architectural bombast rules. These shacks are elemental and beautiful.

In the spirit of austerity, the Belgian pavilion shows bits and pieces of the fabric of heavily used office buildings to highlight the notion of durability and the nature of wear and tear. So, stretches of rubber-studded floor vie for attention with worn painted steel handrails. It's rather moving: all those Belgian feet and hands making their imprint on the bulky architecture of the often unlovely contemporary office.

The Dutch present models of empty buildings highlighting the gormless enormity of architectural waste; how we concrete over anywhere we can for short-term gain, while governments prattle on about sustainability and building shortages.

The Hungarian pavilion is a maze of bright yellow school pencils hanging from ceilings by cotton threads. The idea, backed up by touching videos showing architects' hands – young and old – drawing, made the simple point that, although it's undeniably clever, computer-aided design in architecture has done little to make us happier or more human. Drawing remains the guiding genius of buildings that touch us.

"What makes a livable city?" ask the Danes. Behind a yellow banner posing this perennial question sits a Carlsberg dispensing machine that, I suppose, answers the question, especially in a Venice that has been as hot and sticky as molten glue this summer. Inside their pavilion, though, the Danes have new plans for Copenhagen. While these portray happy consumers in baseball caps and high-five-style poses in front of jaw-jutting buildings you hope will never get planning permission, it's easy to see that the city-by-the-water presented here is a kind of would-be Venice, seen through computer screens and digital processes, darkly. If only, the Danes seem to be saying, we could have the excess of our contemporary world in cities as magical as Venice.

Flower cities and giant tigers

The Finns ask us to "stay with the elements" and "close to nature"; the Austrians clearly want us to retain something of the innocence of childhood with models of a city centre, one made of flowers, another straddled by a centrepiece building in the guise of a tiger. The British presentation, curated by Vicky Richardson of the British Council and London architects muf, is more obscure. Its professed hope – that we will learn to respect natural Venice as much as we have drawn from its culture and architecture in the past – is represented by, among other things, excepts from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice and a wooden model of the Olympic stadium currently being built in London.

Much of this Biennale is thoughtful, even wistful stuff, the concerns of generations faced with the absurd contradiction of a desire, on the part of a minority of humans, to lead a "good" life, and the reality of the many grasping for the very cities, buildings and consumer trash that will bring us all to a hot and sticky end.

With a light yet distinctive touch, Kazuyo Sejima has done well to shape an event that raises such issues while still delighting us with installations that hint at something soulful and magical beyond the humourless world of "urban regeneration" and architectural inanity. She brings us back to the elemental in architecture, and finally to the elements themselves.

• This article was amended on 1 September 2010. The original incorrectly described Italo Calvino as a Venetian. This has been deleted.

Too many design exhibitions are big on architectural theory, but miss what really matters: human beings. This one is different

The problem with architecture exhibitions, so it's argued, is that they lack the one thing you really want to see: real-life buildings. I disagree. The problem with architecture exhibitions is that they fixate on trying to represent buildings that are missing. Photographs, drawings and pretentious wall texts only highlight the fact that yours is a second-hand experience. They place you in the there and then, not the here and now.

The Swiss architect Mario Botta got around this problem spectacularly in 1999 when, for the 400th anniversary of the birth of Francesco Borromini, he built a full-scale wooden model of a cross-section of the baroque master's most famous church, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome. There it was in all its glory – well, half of its glory – on the shore of Lake Lugano.

Most architecture shows don't have Botta's titanic budget. But there is another way, as demonstrated at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale. This is not an exhibition about what buildings look like. Gone is the blowhard shape-making and bad sculpture of the previous biennale, curated by Aaron Betsky in 2008. Neither is it didactic, like the 2006 version, curated by Richard Burdett, which was a blizzard of facts and statistics about cities – vital stuff, but rather like exploring a book pasted on the walls. Instead, this year's show is much more about what should happen inside buildings, the pure experience of space.

The person responsible is Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese practice Sanaa, the architects behind the New Museum in New York and the recent Rolex Learning Center in Lausanne. Sejima is a break from recent biennale directors in that she is a) a woman (the first, in fact) and b) a practising architect. However, perhaps her greatest strength when it comes to curating the biggest architecture show in the world is that she is not an academic. "People meet in architecture" is her theme. It sounds trite, and a little awkward, but this is rather how Sejima speaks. You're never sure whether she is stating the obvious or being incredibly profound. In this case, it seems clear the theme is one that preoccupied her in the making of the Rolex Learning Center, a university building in which there are no walls, just an undulating landscape intended to promote chance meetings between students and disciplines. It's a social education space, like Socrates's Agora but for the Facebook generation.

At the beginning of the Corderie dell'Arsenale, the epic former ropemaking factory of the Venetian navy where a biennale curator tries to make his or her case, there is a 3D movie about that campus building directed by Wim Wenders. Harking back to the famous library scene in his Wings of Desire, Wenders presents the space as a semi-sublime experience. Students free-float angelically, albeit with the slick assurance of actors in a corporate promo video. This rendition of a heavenly space sets the tone for subsequent rooms.

A number of exhibitors have created atmospheric installations that maximise the already considerable drama of this 16th-century building. The architect Tetsuo Kondo and engineers Transsolar have made a cloud with a clearly defined layer of steam floating beneath the rafters, which you can enter and exit like a plane. Almost as ineffable is Junya Ishigami's structure made of thread-like wire so as to be almost invisible. The proposition here is that structure and space (one of which normally encloses the other) can be indistinguishable – a proposition that is clearly on the edge of impossibility, so much so that, last week, it collapsed twice, once after a stray cat couldn't resist having a play (as CCTV footage later revealed).

Sejima has also invited artists to exhibit in the Arsenale. Olafur Eliasson filled his room with a sinister water feature. You enter in pitch black to the sound of water falling, and then realise through the slow strobe lighting that there are streams of it pouring from the ceiling. But instead of falling straight down they are flailing around, whipping the air like the end of a detached high-pressure hose. It's mesmerising, and I imagined people dancing under it. More serenely, Janet Cardiff has separated the voices in Thomas Tallis's Renaissance 40-part choral work Spem in Alium through 40 speakers arranged in a diamond. If you sit in the middle and close your eyes, you feel like a choir of angels is playing blind man's bluff with you.

Captivating moments, but are they architecture? One architect I spoke to felt that Eliasson's water and Transsolar's cloud were simply one-liners. I disagree. That belies how much research and experimentation it took to create them, and they prove there are ways to activate a space that makes a person stop in their tracks and feel alive. It seems clear that this is the message Sejima wants to impart.

But the biennale is not a one-woman show. As well as the main exhibition, dozens of national pavilions get to interpret her theme in their own ways, often lamely but sometimes provocatively. The Dutch pavilion, for example, has created a foam city floating in the air, representing the thousands of state-owned buildings in the Netherlands that are empty – from ex-industrial sites, to disused municipal offices and abandoned churches. People, it seems, do not always meet in architecture. Why focus on new architecture, the curators ask, when so many usable structures are going to waste? Bahrain, meanwhile, took the Golden Lion award for the best pavilion by recreating the ramshackle wooden huts that fisherman have been building on the island's waterfront. On one level, they are simply places to socialise in the open air – "The shopping malls are suffocating," says one fisherman in a video interview – but they are also poignant acts of resistance, attempts to preserve what's left of Bahrain's coastline from the high-rise builders.

For too long, architecture has been the plaything of speculators – not just property developers but city fathers commissioning signature museums as part of their global branding strategies. Buildings are not for portfolios, nor are they simply for architects to express themselves. Sejima reminds us they are for people: people with inner lives, who aren't simply units of flow. The beauty of this year's biennale is that it puts the human experience back at the heart of architecture. Inspiring places are full of spatial and sensory drama. And so are inspiring exhibitions.

Learning Landscapes, a research project into the relationship between students, lecturers and researchers and the buildings they use, aims to bring a new creativity to campus design

Student hostels aren't hotels", says Professor Mike Neary, "nor are university campuses business parks." That, though, is what they have been in danger of turning into over the last decade, says Neary, political sociologist, dean of teaching and learning, and director of the centre for educational research and development at the University of Lincoln. "A decade," he says, "in which neo-liberal economics and the business model for education and politics, as well as business itself, appeared to have triumphed. Yet, it's all over now. Finished."

You can tell that Neary is more than pleased that attitudes to education in Britain are changing now that politicians and educators have finally realised that the brutal, roller-coaster ways of global capitalism are no friends to learning. And yet, over the last decade, many universities have invested in eye-catching architecture aimed, he says, at attracting investors and business, as a way of transforming places that should be free-thinking and outside the immediate commercial equation into marketing-driven "brands". Students have become "customers" in business-style machines for teaching; these are expected to serve the economy by slotting graduates neatly into profitable jobs.

To counteract this tendency and help re-think what universities are, what they are for and how they might build, occupy and use space intelligently – even critically, Neary has spent much of the last three years leading the research for a project called Learning Landscapes in Higher Education. This was set up at Lincoln with Professor David Chiddick, former vice-chancellor of the university, in the chair. Chiddick is the town planner, urban and transport economist who led the University of Lincoln from its old home in Hull to the cathedral city in the 1990s. He has been responsible for some fine-looking buildings on the new Lincoln campus, not least the elegant new school of architecture designed by Rick Mather in the long Gothic shadow of the medieval cathedral.

The Learning Landscapes project probed the ways those who commission university buildings, those who run them, as well as those who teach, learn and research in them actually relate to built space. What role, if any, do students and academics play in the design and use of lecture theatres and other conventional teaching spaces? To what extent are new buildings simply supplied, something that staff and students blindly accept? Is there a growing gap between the concerns of academia, architecture and estate management?

Working with the architects and space-planners DEGW, Neary and his colleagues visited 12 universities in Scotland, England and Wales, conducting extensive interviews in each. The team asked their hosts, including student representatives, what buildings on their campus they would like to "keep, toss or create". What sort of buildings and spaces did they think might live up to Neary's "three Es" – "efficiency, effectiveness and expression"?

As John Worthington of DEGW puts it, the practical aim of this research has been "to dissolve the division between estate departments and teaching and learning that so often results in silos of responsibility and a lack of understanding of each others' work and needs."

Neary, though, believes that the research – published in the spring – is only a stepping-stone on the way to campuses that function as well as they should. "It's been an academic exercise," he says, "and this is just what it needs to have been. Universities are academic. What we need to do is to think of the ways in which the process of research, of critical, academic thinking by students and teachers alike can shape the physical environment around them. A university's architecture and the spaces within it, though, might adopt many different forms and models."

Before I get the chance to ask how such buildings and spaces might possibly look, and how they might be used, Neary points me to Virginia Woolf's advice on how to build a university in Three Guineas, a book-length essay published in 1938. Seeing, during the heyday of totalitarianism in Europe, that our universities had done precious little to breed either a respect for liberty or a hatred for war, Woolf believed such institutions should go back to true basics. "Let it be built on lines of its own. It must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap easily combustible material, which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions. Do not have chapels. Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cages. Let the pictures and books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation by their own hands cheaply."

"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."

Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge."

Now that Neary had given me a concrete, and successful, example of what a new "learning landscape" might be, my mind flashed back to the visit I made a few months ago to the new Rolex learning centre at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland. Designed by the Tokyo-based architects, SANAA, this extraordinary curved and light-filled building, with its garden courtyards, its continually shifting floors, its almost complete rejection of conventional rooms, its lack of corridors and doors, and its gentle spirit of playfulness and inquiry, has been built to bring students from all faculties together. Here is a happily uncertain place of research, of academic inquiry, of debate, research and new thinking. Everything seems possible here. No restrictions on physical movement or thought. "Our focus", says SANAA, "is always to find different relationships."

This is very much what Neary and his colleagues are rooting for, too. It implies, though, nothing less than a quiet revolution in the ways British universities are designed and run. It also demands fresh and original thinking. "One thing I noticed as we travelled from university to university", says Neary, "was how there's a tendency to copy or clone what other universities have already done. While this leads to some incremental learning about what makes teaching and learning spaces work, it does point to a rush to conformity rather than experimentation."

"You can't contain a university," says Neary, meaning that its academic mind should always be expanding and that architecture and space planning within buildings need to respond to this idea. "I suppose you could sum up my approach, in headline terms, as a damning critique of the neo-liberal university. It is, but it's far from impractical. In fact, as Woolf implied, you could create a new, innovative and academically challenging environment in buildings designed in a spirit of poverty."

Neary doesn't demur when I suggest that is what certain orders of medieval monks tried to do. The austere beauty of a Cistercian monastery was no real bridle to thought, although, of course, such places were there to serve God before anyone or anything else.

So, has much of new university building been carried out in vain over the past decade? "Of course there've been some beautiful and excellent buildings", says Neary. "What's been wrong is the whole approach to treating universities as businesses, as an appendage to the economy, rather than places where ideas can be dangerous."

Learning Landscapes in Higher Education makes the point that while academics have been able to make an important contribution "as clients and customers of the project management process", they need to inject academic ideas into the shaping of university buildings and campuses. The Learning Grid at Warwick and the Rolex learning centre at Lausanne give some idea of what may yet be done, and yet, as Neary would say, these examples, no matter how alluring, are not there to be copied. Universities must work things out for themselves.

Meanwhile, as Morag Schiach, pro-vice chancellor for teaching and learning at Queen Mary, University of London and one of Neary's interviewees, bluntly reminds us, "the extent to which higher education should foster intellectual and cultural liberty in the face of pressing economic demands from industry and government is still unresolved."

While impressive GCSE scores at the Barclay school in Stevenage were rightly the main story (Leaking roofs and crumbling classrooms can't halt George and Co's learning surge, 25 August), it's a pity that the piece repeated the pervasive myth that listing always stands in the way of work on a building, whether necessary repairs or alteration to suit changing needs. Many listed schools from every period have been adapted and modernised as educational needs have changed. Recent schemes for listed 20th-century schools, such as Richmond school in Yorkshire and Haggerston school in London, have delivered sensitive and effective refurbishment at a fraction of the cost of a new building, and this would be possible at the Barclay school too. Listing is there to flag up buildings of national special interest, not stand in the way of progress.

Jon Wright

Twentieth Century Society

Welcome to the Northerner, guardian.co.uk's weekly digest of the best of the northern press

"Huddersfield is still part of our global aspirations. It is rooted in our history." That's the kind of thing I like to hear, and it was trumpeted out over Castle Hill in the West Yorkshire town this week. The local partnership of architects that built the intriguing folly of 1899 is still in business after 175 years, and that's quite an achievement for architects; practices seldom last more than a generation; maybe two.

The Huddersfield Examiner reports how Abbey Hanson Rowe, as they were called initially, continued to prosper and has now become part of the Aedas practice (from the Latin Aedificare meaning to build), which, with main offices in London, New York and Hong Kong, is busy all over the world. Not least in Huddersfield. The context of the Castle Hill declaration, given by Aedas director Robert Grayson, is that the firm still has 90 staff working in Huddersfield, with more than 80 of them living in Kirklees, the local authority area.

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I'm not surprised by that. Anyone who knows the Pennine valleys going up from Huddersfield – Summer Wine country – would die to live there, should such a paradox be practicable. Which makes me wonder about the psychology of some BBC mandarins who seem to be making a dog's breakfast of the great relocation of major departments to Salford Quays, whose importance to us in the north cannot be overstated.

I was aghast to read on our own website about the recently appointed head of HR resigning rather than moving up here. So much so that I emailed the BBC to ask what was going on. Here's the reply:

"All our executives will be living and working in the north from day one, when our new base in Salford Quays opens next year. All BBC staff who are relocating and who own a home have the option to rent initially if they have specific circumstances that require them to keep their family home in the south-east (eg if their children will be mid-way through their A-levels), for up to two years before relocating their family home to the north. A number of more junior staff have also chosen this option and the rules are exactly the same for all.

"Peter Salmon, director of BBC North, will be living and working in Salford from day one, and he will relocate his family once his children have finished their exams, which is the commonsense thing to do. Although he would be entitled to relocation costs at that time, he has voluntarily decided to relocate at his own expense, not licence fee payers'.

"In addition, Adrian Van Klaveren, Controller of 5 Live and Richard Deverell, chief operating officer, will also be renting initially for family reasons. Others such as Joe Godwin, director of BBC Children's and Saul Nasse, controller of BBC Learning, will be moving their families from the beginning.

"Whilst executives are committed to relocating their families in the longer term, our relocation policy is designed to allow some flexibility in recognition of the impact that relocations like this can have on family life."

Keep up the pressure everyone. Of course there are family issues around relocation; but talk of 'two years' is alarming when the psychology of this move, and the commitment to real devolution of power and influence, is so crucial.

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Plenty of other new arrivals in the north clearly agree. The Southport Visiter reports that Liverpool has done even better for hotel bookings this year than in 2008, when it was European Capital of Culture – and did a famously good job of it too. Bookings in July broke all records – nearly 95,000 for events such as the Summer Pops, with Rod Stewart on the bill, and the women's open golf championship at Royal Birkdale. The city's total of hotel rooms has risen in response, from 2,650 four years ago to 4,095 now, with three planning applications for new hotels currently before the city council. They would add another 341.

It's a northern thing more widely. I went to York last night to a do at the new Cedar Court Grand hotel, which has spent £25m converting the old North Eastern railway HQ (think county hall with a medieval wall next door). It is already full every weekend, and has up to 60% occupancy during the week; and that's in a city where hotels are everywhere. Please keep them coming.

Incidentally, the subtly differently named Southport Visitor website intrigued me with what appeared to be a candidate for Most Locally Local Story of the Year: "Free parking space on Albert Road". But if you click here you'll see the enjoyable point.

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It's always good to spot local dialect in local papers, even if those of us who don't live there have to reach for the dictionary or Wikipedia. Take the case of Hayley Revell, who writes the Running with Revell column in North Tyneside's News Guardian. She isn't running just now, because of a spelk.

That's Geordie for a splinter, which in Hayley's case was more exotic than usual. She went on a boat trip while on holiday in Turkey, dived in and hit her foot on a rock. When it was still hurting on her return to Newcastle, she went to the doctor, she says, "with what I thought was a posh spelk".

The canny doctor recognised the scrap as coral – impressively for Tyneside, where you don't see much of the stuff. So Hayley's off for an anaesthetic and removal of the pretty but razor-sharp object – in time, she hopes, for her charity go at the Great North Run on 19 September.

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Exotic news now from Louth, where the local Leader has reported monkey sightings two weeks running. Both were made by local police constables, starting with neighbourhood response officer Paul French, who had to brake sharply at South Cockerington when the small beast scampered out in front of his car.

"I thought it was a squirrel at first," he told the Leader. "It was a similar size, but was dark brown in colour and had a long, straight, upright tail. It paused for a moment standing on its hind legs, looked at me, then scampered off over the hedge."

Curiously, I saw what I thought was a dead monkey on the A64 road from Leeds to the hotel do in York (a road to avoid until after the Leeds Festival, which sees colourful and genial but chaotic traffic in the run-up to the bank holiday weekend). So I spent quite a lot of time on the phone to Lincolnshire police, checking out other possible sightings.

There haven't been any, but the police pointed me in the direction of BBC Lincolnshire's website, which has certainly gone the extra mile on the story. Its reporters checked the local East Lindsey district council's records of monkey licences held under the Dangerous Wild Animals Act, found there was only one, and established that its monkey is where it should be – at home.

The mystery therefore continues, as does the identity of my roadside corpse. Further news on either welcome.

Martin Wainwright recommends

Bank holiday offers innumerable attractions in the north, but I'll plump for the chance to be served cream teas all day. This is at Fountains Abbey, the world heritage site in North Yorkshire, which holds a Georgian Day on Sunday, with music and dancing in the lovely water gardens.

In a week that sees the uninviting prospect of an English Defence League demonstration in Bradford, I'd also warmly recommend the Community Celebration organised in response. It's called Be Bradford – Peaceful Together and takes place in Infirmary Fields on Westgate from midday to 4pm. Plus an excellent book by an almost-contestant in Big Brother from that great city, Mahmud Khan. Called The Logic of Half a Moustache, it has the wit, fun and friendliness so under-reported in pieces about Bradford's Muslim community, and you can get it from mahmudkhan.com

• This article was amended on 27 August 2010. The original named an Aedas director as Richard Grayson, and said that the firm was American-led. This has been corrected.

HG Gillett, who has died aged 102, was an accomplished architect and a devoted family man. He was the father of my former wife, the grandfather of my two daughters and someone whose kindness and friendship I valued for more than 50 years.

Herbert Gornall Gillett was born in Hendon, north-west London, the son of George Gillett, a builder, and his wife Mary (nee Gornall). George was the co-owner of Gillett & Stubbs, which built a number of houses in Hendon, Mill Hill, Golders Green and Kenton, and the chief building inspector for the borough of Hendon.

Herbert attended Hampton grammar school and, after studying architecture at Regent Street polytechnic, became an associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects in the 1930s. His first work in that field was in the offices of Sir Edwin Lutyens in Mayfair in the late 1920s.

He joined the architects' department of the London county council (LCC) in 1936 and, apart from the war years, worked in its housing division for the rest of his career.

He participated in civil defence after September 1939 and was a member of a group that designed static water tanks, as well as performing firewatching duties. In 1942, he joined the Royal Engineers with the rank of captain and, after postings to Elgin, in Moray, Scotland, and Anglesey, in north Wales, sailed for India in 1943. He was posted to Lahore and Karachi before being demobilised in late 1945.

He arrived home by Christmas and resumed his career with the LCC in January 1946. He rose to the position of architect grade I and, as such, played an important role in the unprecedented housing effort undertaken by the council in the postwar years.

The projects for which he was architect-in-charge included developments at Putney Heath, Roehampton and Ackroydon, each of which attracted considerable attention in the architectural press. He retired from what was by then the Greater London council in 1972. He remained interested in current affairs into great old age and voted by post in the recent general election.

Herbert was married to Marjorie Cracknell. They had two daughters, Anne and Joan. They were both devoted gardeners and their garden in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, is a surviving testament to their horticultural skills and taste.

Herbert was predeceased by his wife and his younger daughter and is survived by Anne, his grandchildren Emma, Alice and Paul, and seven great-grandchildren.

Lack of planning has given us urban squalor, where, with a bit of regulation, dense populations could live in comfort

England is now the second most crowded country in the European Union, after Malta. It has, for the first time, inched past the Netherlands, with 402.1 people per square kilometre, compared with the Dutch 398.5. This statistic coincides with a rise in net migration, partly caused by a decline in outward emigration. Some have already been quick to link the two.

Overcrowding, class, immigration and race have long been linked in certain quarters. From the apocalyptic 18th century predictions of Malthus through the cannibal megalopolis of the film Soylent Green to the "demographic threat" in Israel-Palestine, the prospect of a teeming mass of inferior folk causing mayhem and starvation, or simply outnumbering "us", has been a persistent obsession.

But if the EU report is given more than a cursory glance, it is easily seen that the apparently alarming statistic is actually about population density, not immigration, "over" crowding or "over" population – nor even the population density of the UK. England might have a density of 402.1 per square km, but the UK as a whole is well below the Netherlands and Belgium at 256.3, roughly the same level as Germany. Scotland and Wales are far below either, with Scotland's level of 70.9 placing it lower than Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania. So what this is really about is concentration of population in very particular places and underpopulation elsewhere. A response to that doesn't necessitate draconian immigration caps, but rather something terribly unfashionable – town planning.

Densely populated areas are not necessarily slums. Among the densest places in the UK are Mayfair and Pimlico, or the west ends of Glasgow and Edinburgh. With their expensive stucco squares and sandstone tenements, these places are by no means dystopian. Given their extreme desirability, an extremely high population density is clearly not so alarming.

Architects and planners, disenfranchised by the suburban non-plan of Thatcherism, spent the 80s and 90s agitating for tightly packed housing, the use of urban brownfield sites, compact cities, piazzas and public transport – all attempts to manage and make urban density comfortable. Under New Labour, this generation – architects like Richard Rogers, planners like Ricky Burdett – had the chance to implement these ideas.

You can see the results all over the UK, wherever "mixed use" blocks of flats fill former industrial land, in the skylines of Leeds and Manchester, in east London. Usually, the results entailed four- to 12-storey flats, built around squares, with mooted shops and facilities in the ground floor. An inner-city housing boom started to match its suburban precursor.

In reality, the shops and nurseries became empty units or estate agents, the squares were inept and windswept, and speculative developers crammed as many tiny flats into their plots as possible. In Stratford you can see the grimmest results – aesthetically stunted, architecturally bumptious towers crowding round wasteland. Does this invalidate the idea? Should we, as some Tories suggest in their screeds against the ludicrous myth of "garden grabbing", celebrate the end of the attempted "urban renaissance" and return to the pseudo-rural suburban sprawl of the 80s, and the depopulation and desuetude of our cities?

Or rather, should we acknowledge that the problem with New Labour, and Rogers and Burdett was that they didn't plan enough? Rather than being held to strict standards, developers were given carte blanche; instead of council housing easing the overcrowding of the poor, a percentage of allegedly affordable housing was sold in each block of terracotta-clad yuppiedromes. Meanness – "value engineering" as it is euphemistically known – was what made the New Labour landscape so grim, not height, planning or modernity, and certainly not overcrowding.