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The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

Anish Kapoor's Olympic tower will be a draw during the Games. But after that?

The success of Britain's best-loved piece of modern public art, the Angel of the North, has been a boon to the nation's sculptors. In every district, especially those scarred by an industrial past, councillors point towards Gateshead and ask: "Can we have one of those?"

Certainly, this question seems to have driven London's mayor, Boris Johnson, to celebrate the 2012 London Olympics with "something to arouse curiosity and wonder". Or perhaps he is looking beyond Antony Gormley's Angel, at the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. The result is the £19m, 115-metre, ArcelorMittal Orbit by Anish Kapoor, "a loop of string arrested in mid-fall", in the words of our architecture critic Rowan Moore.

So will it achieve Johnson's dreams? Our willingness to invest in public art is hugely attractive. So is our love for it. The last two decades have seen great improvements to our public spaces and the Olympic Park in Stratford should add further magic. Public art, despite sponsors' attempts to brand it, can stand as symbol to our beliefs and ambitions.

Of course, not all attempts have had happy endings. While Mark Wallinger's Ebbsfleet horse is eagerly awaited, Manchester's B of the Bang, its steel shards falling at disconcertingly inopportune moments, failed.

It is almost impossible to predict what will work, but something that speaks to our shared sense of culture seems a good bet. That the Orbit is part of that great shared endeavour of the Olympics gets it speedily from the starting blocks. It is clearly designed as a spectacle to draw people. It will achieve that, at least during the Games themselves. And after that? Too often, these sites fall into disrepair. Johnson will need to ensure the new park matches his ambitions.

And if not? Well, Kapoor's Orbit will still be worth a visit, for it will allow us to climb to the top and look away.

It's the most extravagant example of the idea that a huge, strange object can affect tens of thousands. This could be the point at which the idea stops working

It's dangerous to compare it with the Statue of Liberty. The boosters of ArcelorMittal Orbit, the £19m, 115-metre tower to be built on the London Olympic site, announce it will be taller than New York's great green lady, but it's unlikely to be as eloquent. Is the ArcelorMittal steel company, one wonders, as great a cause to be celebrated as liberty? Well, no, but the aim is that this big red sculpture, by the artist Anish Kapoor and the engineer Cecil Balmond, will do more than glorify its generous sponsor. It is the most extravagant example yet of the idea that a big, strange object can lift tens of thousands of people out of deprivation. This idea has had some successes, but the Orbit could mark the point at which it overreaches itself and we decide to try something different in the future.

According to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, the Olympic site "needed something extra, something to distinguish the east London skyline, something to arouse the curiosity and wonder of Londoners and visitors. With £9.3bn going into the Games, we need to do everything we can to regenerate the area and ensure that crowds are still coming here in 2013 and beyond".

The Orbit is therefore to join the ranks of the Angel of the North, the Millennium Dome and the London Eye. Also of the Eiffel Tower, the Seattle Space Needle, the Rotterdam Euromast, the Portsmouth Spinnaker Tower, the Oriental Pearl TV tower in Shanghai and the Unisphere of the 1964 New York World's Fair. Also of the Tower of Juche Idea, Pyongyang, a celebration of the late Kim Il Sung's unique fusion of Korean identity and Marxist-Leninism. The latter, at 170m, is taller than the Orbit and for some reason this is a comparison Johnson chooses not to make.

The Orbit is a landmark, an icon, a thing, a doo-dad, a wotsit. Its aim is to imprint an image on the consciousness of the world, which will also make people want to come to Stratford, east London, even after the Games have gone. It means that, as well as the new Olympic Park, the gigantic new Westfield shopping centre, and whatever might be happening in the ex-Olympic stadium, a great day out in these parts can include a ride to the top of the Orbit. By some associative magic, businesses, investors and housebuyers will want to be there more. This district, whose statistics of deprivation are often repeated, will begin to go up in the world. You might have thought that the Olympic billions were already enough to draw attention to this site, but the Orbit will be the icing on the cake.

It's not wholly fanciful that such landmarks can help lift places. No one can put a figure on jobs created or investments made in Gateshead thanks to the Angel of the North, but it has at least created a feelgood factor and sense of pride. The Bilbao Guggenheim of 1996, still the archetype of such town-boosting, certainly placed a relatively obscure city at the centre of attention.

Buildings can't do it alone and if people find their attention has been drawn only to a wasteland, they will go away again. The Guggenheim worked because there were also dull practical things in Bilbao such as new transport infrastructure and business parks. In this respect, the Orbit is in luck: Stratford, long the example of urban deprivation, has been love-bombed with train lines and parks.

But the most important ingredient of a successful icon is that it works. It has to strike a chord, sound the right note, catch a mood, win hearts and confound sceptics. It must justify the spending of money that might otherwise go on kidney machines or rehousing Haitians. It is a risky business: for every Angel of the North there are many more unloved rotting wrecks that no one has the nerve to demolish.

Here I fear for the Orbit. It's true that Kapoor is a crowd-puller and his recent exhibition at the Royal Academy drew unprecedented numbers for a one-man show by a living artist. But his Olympic monument seems to lack the pith and succinctness with which he usually engages people. His temporary Tarantantara of 1999 (another jewel of Gateshead) was a wonderfully direct construction of two giant funnels that created striking optical effects. His Marsyas in Tate Modern did something similar. Next to these, the Orbit looks ponderous and confused. Its basic concept seems simple, of making a giant structure that is something like a loop of string arrested in mid-fall, but this simplicity is compromised by the stairs and lifts needed to get people into it.

During the two-and-a-bit weeks of the Olympics, it will be animated by crowds descending its stairs, but it's hard to imagine this ever happening again, least of all in the damp east London Februaries of the future. The main thrill it offers is of a view slightly better than that enjoyed by residents of nearby tower blocks and less good than that of bankers in the towers in Canary Wharf. This doesn't seem enough to justify such an effortful work or the maintenance costs.

It's hard to see what the big idea is, beyond the idea of making something big, and the official blurbs don't add much light. These are full of words such as "wonderful", "incredible", "spectacular" and much-repeated "greats". There is some 24-carat guff. The work is variously said to be like "an electron cloud moving" and to have "this sense of energy, twist and excitement that one associates with the human body as it explodes off the blocks down the 100m straight".

Johnson also references his kids, in an ominous echo of Blair's belief that the Millennium Dome could be justified by the pleasure it would give young Euan. As with the Dome, it seems that grandiosity has caused a group of smart people, including Johnson, Kapoor and Balmond, to do something dumb. They all laughed, of course, when Christopher Columbus told them that the world was round and it's possible that in two-and-a-bit years we sceptics will be humbled by the joy and majesty of the Orbit. Right now, it threatens to be an urban lava lamp. It might look fun on 25 December, but by the 27th you're cursing the need to change its bulbs. So what else could be done with this creative energy and £19m?

It could have gone into beautifying those parts of Stratford where people live. It could ensure that the aquatic centre and other Olympic venues have enough money to keep running after the Games. It could have paid for uplifting places as needy as Stratford, but without its celebrity. It could have helped in making the safety-first architecture of the Olympic buildings a little less boring, so there would have been no need for another injection of excitement. But these would have been less good advertising for ArcelorMittal and you couldn't have compared them to the Statue of Liberty.

How does Anish Kapoor's 'Mr Messy' design for an Olympic tower compare to Gustave Eiffel's Paris icon?

At the unveiling of Anish Kapoor's design for the Orbit tower it was compared to the Colossus of Rhodes and the Tower of Babel. But the history of those follies isn't auspicious. The Colossus of Rhodes was destroyed by an earthquake after standing for only a few decades, and the Tower of Babel was, the book of Genesis tells us, constructed to glorify those that constructed it.

I can't help wondering to what extent the ArcelorMittal Orbit is being built for the glory of Boris Johnson, Kapoor and Lakshmi Mittal. And as details emerge of its Olympic corporate entertainment role, it looks less and less like a work of art. But setting the motivation of the creators aside, the worst comparison of all is with the Eiffel Tower.

Gustave Eiffel's iconic tower was not designed as a piece of public art, nor was it intended to remain in Paris more than 20 years. It was built as a grand entrance for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, and was designed to be easy to take apart. It became a work of art in the eyes of the world against the protestations of the Parisian art world. And it remained, in part, because of its utility. It was used for early radio experiments at the start of the 20th century and in 1910 the tower was used to detect cosmic rays. To this day its top bristles with antennae, and its bottom bustles with tourists.

Another problem with comparing Kapoor's structure with Eiffel's is that what makes the Parisian tower so pleasing to the eye is that its shape was dictated by the forces of the wind, not by the foolishness of man. Eiffel is quoted as saying:

"Now to what phenomenon did I have to give primary concern in designing the Tower? It was wind resistance. Well then! I hold that the curvature of the monument's four outer edges, which is as mathematical calculation dictated it should be will give a great impression of strength and beauty, for it will reveal to the eyes of the observer the boldness of the design as a whole."

By following the forces of nature, Eiffel's massive iron structure appears graceful and almost part of the natural environment.

By comparison, Kapoor's structure is a prime example of man demonstrating his mastery over nature. The sweeping shape is reminiscent of melted roller coaster ride, or as one Twitter user put it: "It looks like congealed intestines". The horror of which was only replaced in my mind by the relief of recalling that Kapoor and not Damien Hirst had been awarded the design contract.

But the worst part about comparing the Orbit with the Eiffel is the idea that London needs to rival Paris in the metal tower stakes. London already beat Paris to host the 2012 Olympics; now it seems Johnson wants to rub salt in French wounds. The copycat unoriginality of building London's Eiffel verges on parody when one realises that the Orbit will be 100m shorter than the Parisian monument and 20m shorter than the diminutive Blackpool Tower.

The true determinant of whether the Orbit deserves a place on London's skyline should be how it is perceived by Londoners. It would be hard to find a Parisian today who hates the Eiffel Tower; Boris Johnson should set a 20-year time limit on Kapoor's tower and let the public decide. If in 2032 it hasn't endeared itself to the residents of Stratford and beyond it should be pulled down. Since the tower is to be made of steel it could be safely recycled.

That standard has applied to at least one other London icon. The giant ferris wheel London Eye, after all, was initially a temporary attraction that married engineering prowess with a graceful form. It has stood the test of time and looks set to stay on the banks of the River Thames. In it London already has a worthy rival for Eiffel. And from it a panoramic view of London is already possible.

Writing in the Times, the architecture critic Tom Dyckhoff described the tower as a "giant Mr Messy". But initial reactions should be tempered by allowing time to pass; perhaps I'll get over thinking it looks like a giant blood clot. Whether you love it or hate it, the last word should go to Johnson, who said of the Orbit: "It would have boggled Gustave Eiffel". There's no arguing with that.

The London mayor wants to build an enormous monument in Stratford. It sounds like a folly of Olympic proportions

You need to pinch and punch yourself to be sure this isn't 1 April. News that Boris Johnson is planning to build a £15m monument, in what appears to be his own honour – it couldn't be London's – in the grounds of the 2012 Austerity Olympics in Stratford, must surely be a joke. This is the kind of thing you'd expect from a Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il or, of course Shelley's "Ozymandias" (Ramesses the Great), but not an elected mayor of London in the second decade of the 21st century.

The tower is, apparently, to be funded by the richest man in Britain, Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born steel magnate. The Telegraph of Calcutta has understandably dubbed the potty project the Mittal Monument, rather than the more appropriate Johnson's Folly, and has published an artist's impression of the proposal in the guise of an enormous, rust-red electricity pylon – a symbol, I suppose, of how Britain's attitude to industry and the economy in general, is viewed by more dynamic countries overseas.

It's hard to know if the Indian newspaper is taking the mickey or not, and indeed hard to believe that Johnson or his press department can be serious. This is especially true when Johnson talks of building a monument to rival the Eiffel tower, the showpiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle and, ever since, a popular symbol of Paris. The Eiffel tower cost around 8 million francs, or at least £33m in today's figures, although given absolute increases over the ensuing 120 years in the prices of labour and materials, the cost of building a new Eiffel tower would be very much higher than this. The London Eye, completed a decade ago, cost £75m, which suggests an Eiffel tower would be more expensive again, and so, no matter how generous, Mittal's £15m won't go far to meet Johnson's vaulting ambition.

London, and its mayors, should have learned from the mistakes of such inane follies as the £1bn Millennium Experience to steer well clear of overweening monumentalism. London is a city of many modest monuments, from the City churches of Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor to the 1930s underground stations commissioned by Frank Pick, chief executive of the London Passenger Transport Board from the architect Charles Holden, two modest men who turned down knighthoods and were paid no bonuses for the great contribution they made to the workings and appearance of everyday London.

It seems significant, too, that this year's Stirling prize for architecture, an event taken seriously by those keen on the most fashionable contemporary landmark buildings, was awarded not to a monumental building but to the gentle and subtle Maggie's Centre, for cancer care, by London's Charing Cross hospital. Times have clearly changed, although not, it seems, for the mayor of London.

Perhaps, though, Johnson's head has been turned as much by Mittal's millions, as by a joint initiative between the Arts Council and London 2012 that also seems like one monumental joke. This initiative is called – and I'm not making this up, I hope – "Artists taking the lead" – although you may want to replace the final word with another of four letters. In this case, £5.4m is to be spent on 12 "extraordinary artworks" up and down the country to celebrate the 2012 Olympics. Announced on 21 October, the magnificent dozen includes three hand-crocheted 30ft lions for Nottingham, a "monumental spinning column of cloud and light" in Birkenhead and a gigantic Lady Godiva puppet for the west Midlands. Meanwhile, "an abandoned DC-9 aeroplane will 'nest' in locations across Wales, and be transformed and animated the local communities who take ownership of it."

Given all this, and still being unsure of whether or not Johnson or the Arts Council is being in any way serious, I recommend that Mark Wallinger's giant white horse should be erected not in Ebbsfleet, Kent, but in the Olympic park and named "Maybe it's a big horse ... I'm a Londoner" in honour of Johnson and the great 2012 event. Either that, or perhaps Mittal could be persuaded to stump up for a giant white elephant with the head of Mayor Johnson crowned with the satirical 2012 London Olympics logo.

Sri Carmichael and Mira Bar-Hillel:

The clash between the Labour government, which opposes high rise, and the Mayor, who has become a convert to new building projects, has ended in a planning stalemate as the recession bites. At least 21 London property schemes could be scrapped or dramatically shrunk.

There follows a telling round-up of the capital's stunted tower projects, each a tale of crunched credit or obstruction of Boris by Blears. What interests me - because I can't yet detect one - is the guiding principle behind the Mayor's policy on towers. He's said yes to them more often than his critics would like, yet he's just said no to Rafael Vinoly's intended 300 metre-tall glass chimney on the site of Battersea power station. Building Design and Construction reports:

After opposition from local residents and Johnson, REO, which is 67% owned by the Treasury, has decided to replace the dome with individual canopies covering the buildings and abandon plans for the tower, which would have been one of the tallest structures in London.

The Mayor's office emphasises that Boris isn't against tall buildings where they are "appropriate". But what does "appropriate" mean?

Amanda Baillieu:

Just as green belt land is often ordinary farmland with no special claim to preservation, we need to ask why we are protecting particular views that — with some notable exceptions — are no more special than others. Of course no one can not enjoy seeing St Paul's from the top of Primrose Hill or Richmond Park, but why is this more special than the view from the terrace of the National Theatre?

Now read on.

At Building, Michael Willoughby:

Mayor Boris Johnson attacked his workplace, the 2002 Greater London Authority (GLA) building, as one of the worst in London shortly before handing its developer a planning award.

Love it. Now read on.

Simon Jenkins in the Standard:

Boris Johnson swore that he would rescind Livingstone's towers. He told all comers that he would "stop the madness". Yet no sooner was he in "the testicle" than he craved a phallus. The developer lobbyists got to him and undermined his self-confidence.

The Mayor, of course, doesn't see it quite that way. Whatever, Jenkins might reflect that several boroughs have lobbied for towers too and that he, like Boris, spoke during the election campaign in favour of boroughs being free from bossy mayors. You can't have it both ways.

An Evening Standard leader:

Boris Johnson's policy of restricting approval for tall buildings in London to limited areas was once a fundamental element of his approach to planning. But his approval for tall buildings in Wandsworth and Ealing, areas without existing clusters of blocks, suggests an approach more like the ad-hoc policy of his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, who took a notoriously lax attitude to skyscrapers. Now Mr Johnson has a chance to show whether his planning policy for our skyline has rigour or consistency.

A new proposal for The Spires, three enormous tower blocks right by City Hall, is being submitted for approval. It would be hard to justify. The tallest of the three would reportedly offer views of the English Channel; together they would interfere with the Mayor's own views. In a downturn, there is little economic rationale for projects like this; aesthetically, there is even less. Mr Johnson should say no.

Wow, Veronica really has left the building hasn't she? No wonder Boris is putting on a Russian festival, of which he says:

Russian Londoners are a thriving community who have made a significant contribution to the capital both economically and culturally. I encourage everyone to come and enjoy this fantastic festival offering.

Are you listening, Alexander?

More on The Spires and other Irvine Sellar proposals for central London here.