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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.

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.

Prince Charles's intervention caused Qatari royal family's property company to withdraw planning application, partner company argued

The high court ruled today that the Qatari royal family's property company breached its contract with a partner company when it withdrew a planning application for the £3bn Chelsea barracks development after the intervention of Prince Charles.

Mr Justice Vos said Qatari Diar, which is owned by the royal family, breached the contract when it withdrew Lord Richard Rogers' modernist designs on the eve of a planning decision. The Prince of Wales had complained directly to the prime minister of Qatar, saying "my heart sank when I saw the plans" and advocating a more traditional design.

CPC Group, the company owned by the Monaco-based property developer Christian Candy, who had been Qatari Diar's partner on the project, was claiming £81m in compensation because it said the reason behind the decision to withdraw breached its contract. Candy argued that the withdrawal was a direct result of the prince's intervention with the prime minister and the emir. Qatari Diar had argued that the designs were withdrawn because they were unlikely to be granted permission by local authorities.

Mr Justice Vos said he did not accept that the London mayor, Boris Johnson, had indicated an intention "to exercise his power to direct the [Westminster city council] to refuse the planning application", as the Qatari side had claimed.

The judgement clears the way for an application for costs and damages by CPC.

In a summary of the judgement, Mr Justice Vos said: "QD's conduct in relation to the planning application, including its dealings with the Prince of Wales and its new outline strategy and the withdrawing of the planning application, was not a breach of its duty of utmost good faith."

The judge said the Qataris found themselves in a difficult situation after the prince's intervention: "... it was between a rock and a hard place, and was doing the best it could in difficult circumstances".

The verdict will be seen as a victory for Rogers and other architects who have long complained that the prince has too much influence on the democratic planning process and that his interventions exceed his constitutional role.

The court heard claims that a Qatari Diar executive systematically deleted emails containing references to the interference of the prince and his private secretary, Sir Micheal Peat, ahead of the hearings, and did not disclose them until ordered to do so by the court. The Qataris denied this.

CPC Group had been a development partner with Qatari Diar, the state-owned development company, but had sold its stake prior to the prince's intervention. It retained a contract which included a payment of up to £81m if the scheme won planning consent.

Lord Grabiner, representing CPC, told Mr Justice Vos that the Qataris "floundered" after Prince Charles and his aides launched a "fight to the finish" to derail designs for more than 500 apartments on the former site of the Chelsea Barracks by Rogers, the modernist architect with whom the prince has repeatedly clashed.

Damages are due to be awarded at a later date, but the judge said Candy was not entitled to a payout of £68.5m under the original contract, as he had claimed.

• Irish owners refinance and want to list the project on Aim
• See our gallery of previous redevelopment plans

The troubled owners of Battersea power station have unveiled plans to float the building on the stock exchange in the latest in a string of attempts to redevelop the derelict London landmark.

Despite numerous plans for the 40-acre site, it has stood empty for more than a quarter of a century while the rest of the Thames waterfront around it has undergone huge change.

Now Irish property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO), which bought the Battersea site in 2006 for £400m, wants to spin it off and possibly float it on London's Alternative Investment Market (Aim). It is also looking for a partner to take a 50% stake in the project and provide the financial firepower.

REO has been hit hard by the Irish property slump. It reported an underlying loss before tax of nearly £1bn for the 14 months to 28 February, reflecting an £811m drop in the valuation of its property portfolio.

The firm has drawn up a shortlist of possible investors after being approached by a number of international real estate groups, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds from around the world, including the Middle East.

REO hopes to get permission to redevelop the site in September after submitting the largest ever planning application made in central London, in terms of financial value, last autumn. If it gets the go-ahead, the site's value is expected to soar from the current valuation of £388m.

"It's an opportunity to turn the power station into a cultural icon for London," said Robert Tincknell, who runs REO's parent firm, Treasury Holdings. "A year ago, people were saying 'it's not going to happen'. That's changed enormously over the last 12 months, with the planning permission having gone in and the support we have [from the London mayor, Boris Johnson, English Heritage and Wandsworth Council]." The Conservatives launched their election manifesto at the power station in April.

Treasury Holdings was forced to tear up its plans for the imposing building, one of London's most recognisable landmarks, and start again after Johnson decided that a proposed tower would ruin the view from Waterloo Bridge to the Palace of Westminster. The original plan, drawn up by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly, included a futuristic 300m glass funnel and atrium, rising from an enormous transparent dome.

Viñoly and Treasury Holdings came up with a new blueprint a year ago that is capped at a height of 60m, as stipulated by the mayor. It includes 3,700 homes, office space, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, at a cost of £4.5bn. Treasury Holdings also hopes to co-fund an extension of London Underground's Northern Line to the site.

The high cost means the company needs a partner – "someone who can bring big financial strength to it to make sure it happens," said Tincknell. Building work could start at the end of 2011.

When the power station was decommissioned in 1983, its then owners, the Central Electricity Generating Board, wanted to tear down the building and replace it with housing, but it had been given a Grade II listing in 1980. For developers, the real prize is the land around it; most have little interest in its heritage status.

REO said today it had negotiated new lending terms for Battersea with Lloyds Banking Group and Nama – Ireland's "bad bank" – which means its existing bank facility will be extended and all outstanding breaches waived.

Battersea Power station is to be demerged from the loss-making Irish property company that now owns it, and floated on the Aim market. There have been many false starts on the redevelopment of the station over the years...

This attack on brownfield development means more green fields will be built on

Michael White draws attention to the government's attack on "garden grabbing" brownfield development (Prisons, power stations and social housing – just not in my backyard, 10 June).

He is right to point out the links to localism, populism and nimbyism: "the empowerment of sharp-elbowed locals to prevent developments they don't like". But why would a minor bit of middle-class rabble-rousing find a place in the incoming government's first legislative programme?

White appears to assume that the issue is about the physical capacity of "old industrial land [and] gardens from past eras" to accommodate enough new homes. In fact, the key question is the right balance between extending the city and renewing its existing fabric. During the Thatcher and Major years, I was responsible for planning and transport policy in Newcastle and Birmingham. I coined the term "brownfield" (in 1976) to express the tension between urban renewal and greenfield development in the dynamics of urban change. Brownfield development, in this view, is like cell replacement in the body, an essential part of the continuing health of a city.

White rightly draws attention to how Prescott's brownfield strategy "eased the pressure on green belt and greenfield sites". However, by focusing simply on numbers of new houses, he (like Prescott) underplays the importance of the strategy to housing choices more generally. In practice, only 10% of housing transactions each year are new homes – and most of these are built within existing neighbourhoods and on brownfield land. As Prescott recognised, there is not a finite stock of brownfield sites; with good local planning brownfield supply is constantly being replenished.

White implies that the current furore is just the perennial conflict of nimbyism with developers. But there is a bigger issue: rapidly rising house prices from the mid-90s were blamed by the 2004 Barker Report on an inadequate supply of new homes, and this in turn on lack of land. Developers took the opportunity to attack Prescott's emphasis on brownfield because greenfield land is easier and more profitable to develop.

We can now see that house prices were a bubble pumped up with hot money and unreal expectations of capital gains. But the last government did a policy U-turn, persuaded by developers that more greenfield land would mean more new houses and (eventually) lower prices – and that higher profitability would provide infrastructure, services and social housing. As a result, twice or three times as much greenfield land is now in the pipeline.

With nimby constituents, Conservatives and Lib Dems generally opposed these increases. How ironic, then, that the coalition's attack on brownfield development inevitably means more green fields will go under the bulldozer – even as developers are backing out of the planning gains that justified this.

However much (or little) new housing the market will now bear, almost all will henceforth be on greenfield land, with dire consequences for cities, neighbourhoods, social fabric, transport demands, and most people's housing needs.

• This article was amended on 21 June 2010. Owing to an editing change, a line in the original said: "As Prescott recognised, there is a finite stock of brownfield sites". This has been corrected

Commission for Sustainable London 2012 calls for transfer of low-carbon lessons from Olympics to the wider UK industry

Organisers of the London 2012 Olympics risk missing a golden opportunity to inspire a step change towards a low-carbon economy, the green watchdog for the games has warned.

The Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 released its annual review on how the games' sustainable vision is taking shape. The UK's green promises were key reasons why Seb Coe and his team won the bid in Singapore in 2005.

Although the report said that the Olympic Delivery Authority, which has responsibility for construction and design of the venues and infrastructure, had maintained a high standard of sustainable design, the benefits to the UK's wider green economy could be lost before the games even begin unless "the knowledge in people's heads is captured before they leave".

With just over two years to go until the games begin, planning has now reached a critical stage as the ODA scales back in anticipation of the completion of venues next year.

The Local Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, responsible for running the event, will take on an increasingly greater role in delivering the sustainable targets for London 2012.

The report, Raising the Bar, says: "Our main area of concern lies in the wider commitments that were made during the bid or just afterwards. Broad promises have been made in official documents: 'to make the Olympic Park a blueprint for sustainable living' and 'to be a catalyst for new waste management infrastructure in east London'.

"With the exception of a few worthy initiatives, there is no comprehensive plan to make this happen. Furthermore, it is not clear what definitions lie behind these expressions or who is responsible for making them happen.

"With just over two years to go before the 'inspirational power of the Games' moves to Rio, never to return to London, these issues need to be resolved."

Shaun McCarthy, head of the commission, said: "Having an Olympics is an inherently unsustainable thing to do. To build all this stuff to watch some people run around – what's sustainable about that?

"We have to ask ourselves is it good enough just to have some great sustainable venues and put on a sustainable games which we are increasingly confident about, or will the Olympics really make a difference?

"Is this going to be something in isolation so we have one great big sustainable Olympics and then go back to business as usual?

"Or will the games actually change things? Because that was the promise that was made when we won the bid.

"A lot of carbon has been saved by comparison with business as usual construction techniques. If we can transfer that knowledge to the wider industry, we can save a lot more carbon than will be emitted in the whole of the Olympic Games.

"How can we use the magic of the Olympic Games to make that happen?"

McCarthy cited lower-carbon cement, low-toxin plastics and a zero landfill waste target as some of the achievements so far.

The stadium is the lightest Olympic stadium, using a quarter of the concrete used for the Beijing games, and features a lighting system suspended from a compression wheel made from re-purposed gas pipes left over from a different construction project.

McCarthy singled out the velodrome as an especially good example of sustainable design, with its ultra-lightweight roof and natural lighting and ventilation.

But he admitted that results have been mixed on the Olympic park. Zaha Hadid's feted aquatic centre, with a roof made from 3,000 tonnes of steel, was a "sharp lesson" in sustainable construction.

"That is a lot of steel just to cover a swimming pool and it is not necessary to have that much," McCarthy said, adding that the architect had simply been asked to design "a beautiful building" before the bid gained momentum.

But he said he was "very disappointed" that the energy centre in the Olympic park would run on gas, not biogas from onsite waste.

He also said he had concerns about London mayor Boris Johnson's approval of the ArcelorMittal Orbit tower in the park.

"It's very early days for the Orbit tower. Yes, I am concerned that it is a lot of steel. We are asking the Greater London Authority questions about it but we haven't yet had a satisfactory response.

"We would expect the mayor's office and the GLA to work to at least the same high standards of sustainability as the ODA."

An ODA spokesperson said: "We welcome the scrutiny of the commission and will continue to work with them to address any concerns they may have.

"The report states that the commission is pleased with our progress and they believe we are on track to meet challenging and extensive sustainability targets that have never been achieved before on a project of this size and scale.

"Our sustainability strategy was embedded into our processes at the start of the project and is already being delivered onsite.

"We are currently pulling together the best practice and lessons that have been learnt from the project so that they can be used by the industry for future projects."

Property tycoons take dispute over prince's alleged torpedoing of £3bn Richard Rogers residential development to high court

A bitter dispute involving the Prince of Wales, the Qatari royal family and architect Lord Rogers, who claims a multibillion-pound property project was wrecked by the prince, will come to a head in the high court this week.

Luxury property tycoons Nick and Christian Candy have lodged a claim for breach of contract over the withdrawal of plans for their Rogers-designed residential scheme at Chelsea Barracks by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment, a property company backed by the emirate of Qatar.

The Candy brothers' company, CPC group, and Rogers had planned to develop the 5.2-hectare (13-acre) site, opposite Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital Chelsea near Sloane Square, London, into a £3bn mix of luxury flats and more affordable housing.

But the planning application was dropped last June, after Prince Charles wrote to the head of the Qatari royal family's firm, which owns the site, branding the design of 548 flats in 17 blocks unsympathetic and unsuitable for the area.

At the height of the dispute some of the world's leading architects, including Frank Gehry and Lord Foster, criticised the prince for using his position to interfere.

While the prince, whose outspoken views against modern architecture are well-known, will not be called to the stand, his presence is expected to loom large in the proceedings as letters and other documents reveal his influence over development at one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the UK.

The brothers claim it was the prince's interference that persuaded the Qataris to abandon the project, and are suing for a reported £81m.

The controversy was sparked after the leaking of a letter the prince had written on 1 March last year to Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim, the chairman of Qatari Diar. It emerged he had voiced concerns over "one more brutish development" and that, in May last year, he invited the Emir of Qatar and his wife, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missnesd, for tea at Clarence House.

In an interview last June after the project was scrapped, Lord Rogers told the Guardian: "Up to two months ago we were pretty convinced we were going to get out scheme through Westminster's planing committee. We enjoyed some of the strongest support I have ever had from Westminster and the Greater London Authority ... I thought we were home and dry. I just don't know what happened."

The scheme had been opposed by a residents' group, though much of the local opposition had been assuaged by changes to the scale of the blocks of flats.

The row carries echoes of previous disputes where Prince Charles has made his views on modern architecture plain. Twenty-five years ago he described a planned extension to the National Gallery by the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend".

Today, a spokesman for Clarence House said: "Prince Charles is entitled to his private opinions. Any dispute between the Candys and the Qataris is for them to resolve, not us. The prince knows the emir and his wife extremely well and the meeting would have happened anyway as part of his royal and diplomatic role.

• This article was amended on 17 May 2010. The original said that the target of Prince Charles's "carbuncle" remark was a Richard Rogers design for the National Gallery extension. This has been corrected.

Is a tower sponsored by a steel empire with emissions matching that of the Czech Republic appropriate as a lasting monument to the 'world's first sustainable Olympics'?

I'm a fan of oversized structures open to the public with fantastic views across cities, from the Eiffel Tower to the Rockfeller Centre. I'm even a fan of Anish Kapoor's work. (Isn't it time the Queen created a new post of artist laureate specially for Kapoor?)

But the decision to embrace ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steelmaker, as the sponsor for the £19m Kapoor-designed Orbit tower – or Boris's Olympic folly as it is becoming known – is one that really sends me into a spin.

I don't care that the tower resembles a 115m helterskelter tangled in Wembley stadium's arch. But during London's bid for the Olympics, sustainability was the buzzword. The London games would "set an example for how sustainable events and urban planning take place around the world in future."

Is the Orbit the type of landmark the organisers of the 2012 Olympics – who have some impressive green achievements under their belt – really had in mind when it said London would host the world's "first sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games"?

The commission was agreed by the London mayor, Boris Johnson, and the Olympic minister, Tessa Jowell. But the choice of ArcelorMittal appears to have been thanks to a chance encounter between Johnson and the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal "in a Davos cloakroom".

But for Johnson to make his mark on London 2012 and its legacy with thousands of tonnes of steel, one of the world's most carbon-intensive materials, appears at odds with the sustainable values of the Olympic Delivery Authority and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) – and the spirit of the times.

ArcelorMittal's court challenge to Europe's cap-and-trade scheme, recently reported by PointCarbon, is its most recent act of resistance against the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS), the main mechanism for driving down CO2 levels in industry. ArcelorMittal's action brought before the European general court sought damages for being forced to pay for its greenhouse gas emissions because the company claimed the scheme threatened its business unfairly. The court dismissed the challenge last month.

Although ArcelorMittal is cagey about its own figures for allocation of carbon credits, climate campaigners have been hard at work poring over data for the EU ETS. Sandbag which campaigns to restrict the number of credits traded on the ETS, last year published a report with the help of Carbon Market Data claiming that by 2012 the company would have 80m carbon credits that it does not need, and was given for free. If sold, the company stands to make £1bn in windfall profits, says Sandbag. A tidy profit for doing, well not much, made by a company led by Mittal, who also happens to be Europe's richest man.

But this prospect hasn't prevented the company – along with the rest of the industry – from whingeing about its obligations under the EU ETS and demanding special treatment from the European commission by warning of "carbon leakage", that they claim would force factories to relocate to regions which have no cap-and-trade scheme.

In its corporate responsibility report, How will we achieve safe sustainable steel, ArcelorMittal admits its emissions are high. Every year it produces around 220m tonnes of carbon w – equivalent to the whole output of the Czech Republic or just under half of the UK's total emissions in 2009.

ArcelorMittal aims to reduce emissions from steel manufacture by 8% in 10 years' time and is already the world's largest recycler of scrap steel – to the tune of 25m tonnes a year – which it claims saves 35m tonnes of CO2 annually. ArcelorMittal has already won one of the first gold medals of the games with this PR coup to sponsor the Orbit. But it has missed an added opportunity to extra shine to its steel business with a commitment to using at least a large proportion of recycled steel in its construction.

But when I asked ArcelorMittal and the mayor's office to explain what makes the steel giant an appropriate sponsor of the lasting monument to the "world's first sustainable Olympic games", both refused to comment directly.

They referred me to a press release by the London mayor's office in which the only mention of sustainability comes in the notes at the bottom:

ArcelorMittal recognises that it has a significant responsibility to tackle the global climate change challenge; it takes a leading role in the industry's efforts to develop breakthrough steelmaking technologies and is actively researching and developing steel-based technologies and solutions that contribute to combat climate change.

Bryony Worthington from Sandbag says: "Boris really should have done his homework. While on the surface ArcelorMittal like to appear a responsible company they have been very active opponents of climate change regulations in Europe. They have also been amassing a small fortune in spare CO2 emissions permits as a result of lobbying for generous allocations. They now have more control over emissions trading in Europe than some countries."

As a Londoner and a sports fan, I wish he'd bumped into someone else in the cloakroom at Davos. But who, one of the other sponsors such as British Airways or BP? Last year ArcelorMittal had revenues of $65.1bn (£42.4bn). What other company would have £16m spare right now? In these straitened times, would London be better off without such a monolith to a steel empire with CO2 emissions equivalent to that of the Czech Republic?

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.