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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.

My sources are legitimate. I've interviewed those who knew him and accessed his archive

Rosemary Hill must have good judgment as a historian: she has won a prize for her book on Stonehenge and enjoyed praise for her study of Augustus Pugin. But she doesn't give that impression in her review of my new book Pevsner – The Early Life: Germany and Art (The adopted Englishman, Review, 10 July).

She is aware, for example, that in writing this first volume of Sir Nikolaus Pevsner's first-ever biography, I haven't had access to his diaries. She therefore says, vaguely but insidiously, that I "make grave insinuations knowing that much of the evidence is missing". In doing so she makes three "grave insinuations" of her own: that what I've written is suspect; that without the diaries I've been handicapped; and that my knowledge of that handicap should have held me back.

Of course I'd love to have had the diaries, but it's wrong that nothing else matters or that, in Hill's words, only "in the diaries [Pevsner] kept at the time" is there "the evidence that would confirm or refute" conclusions sourced from elsewhere.

It's entirely possible to know about Pevsner from other sources. Mine include the 70 shelf-feet of papers in the Pevsner archive in Los Angeles, the archives of the many bodies he was associated with, a mass of official documents, his own privately circulated family history, and the memories of the people I've talked to who knew him in Germany, including his wife's sister, two first cousins, surviving former students in Göttingen, and contemporaries from his schooldays in Leipzig.

These sources aren't illegitimate or inadequate, as Hill implies. In fact, they often provide an independent means of testing what Pevsner said about himself. If Hill has a basis for discounting them, I'd be the first to make appropriate corrections, but she shouldn't sound alarm bells just because she doesn't like what the best available evidence currently shows.

Equally, it's essential not to borrow what Pevsner did later to explain what he did earlier and in different circumstances. Hill challenges evidence of Pevsner's political attitudes by offering readers a simplistic (and inaccurate) story, often trotted out, about how his behaviour in 1939 (six years after my book closes) proves that he was "simply naive about Nazism" in the early 1930s, adding tritely, "what other explanation is there?" Well, several.

She also makes her unfounded doubt about Pevsner's uncomfortable relations with his father into a giant doubt about the whole project, and minimises, in one grudging sentence, my achievement in "establishing the academic and intellectual context in which, in his twenties, Pevsner's career blossomed", when in fact this is the core of the book.

Hill has fallen back lazily on the very canards my research has challenged, and on the "imminent" appearance of another biography, based on the diaries, in which she has more trust. But that book hasn't appeared yet, and until it does its use as a yardstick for measuring an actual work is speculative and improper. Hill should know better.

The Gateshead car park is being demolished this week. It's a tragedy, and not just for its architect

Owen Luder, twice president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, is Britain's unluckiest architect. In the 60s his firm designed several once-celebrated, subsequently reviled Brutalist buildings – all now either demolished, defaced or derelict.

The latest casualty is Trinity Square in Gateshead, a combined car park and shopping centre most famous for its malevolent, melodramatic presence in Mike Hodges' Get Carter. It's one of a series of commissions that bankrupted their developer, E Alec Colman Investments – along with the (mutilated, clad in white plastic) Eros House in Catford and the (demolished, replaced by a surface car park) Tricorn Centre in Portsmouth.

Though Luder's name was on the contracts and blueprints, the lead designer was Rodney Gordon, a former social architect with the London county council seduced into shopping centres. Trinity Square promised the realisation of his dreams – a metropolis architecture of dramatic skylines, multiple levels and striking forms, on a parsimonious budget. He died last year, entirely unrepentant.

And why should he have been? These are – or rather, were – wrenchingly powerful, physical buildings, in a tradition of dark, looming, twisted architecture that stretches from Newcastle Cathedral to John Vanbrugh. Unfortunately, we have collectively decided that architecture must be either Heritage – only Baroque is allowed to be bulging and overwhelming, only Gothic can be freakish and discordant – or Regeneration, in which case all must be glassy, shiny and colourful. Luder and Gordon's generation were too modern for the former, not patronising enough for the latter.

Luder didn't descend from Hampstead to foist his gigantic concrete buildings on the benighted proletariat, but from the Old Kent Road. "Growing up as I did in rented rooms in tightly built Victorian terrace houses with no inside loo," he said, "I went along with Le Corbusier's vision of beautifully appointed multistorey houses set in big landscaped open spaces." Yet Eros House, the Tricorn and Trinity Square were cranky, strange things, doomed to commercial failure because of their architectural caprices. The Tricorn never had enough retail space to entice an "anchor", was not sufficiently freeze-dried and air-conditioned. Proles for Modernism, a mysterious south-coast group who picketed the Tricorn's redevelopers, praised it for exactly this reason.

The Tricorn's demolition inspired protests, artworks and graffiti ("WARNING – THIS BUILDING MAY PROVOKE INTEREST"). As if to neuter this, Gateshead council has sponsored both Trinity Square's demolition and its commemoration in various art events.

When he was Riba president, Luder famously hailed Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building – essentially a more expensive Tricorn in steel – as "sod you" architecture. But at the same time, he is rare in architectural circles for actually trying to explain his buildings – when Trinity Square popped up on Channel 4's Zhdanovite Demolition, Luder managed to sway some of its haters.

Trinity Square failed to be sufficiently boring. That's not the case with its mooted replacement – a Tesco store with student flats on top, clad in as many materials as possible so as not to offend, concrete-framed but avoiding the dreaded faux pas of showing the material. Rodney Gordon claimed "architecture should appeal to the emotions. It should give you that feeling from your balls to your throat". With this demolition, we're exchanging architecture as a physical experience for buildings as a mute, grinning, lobotomised accompaniment to consumerism. We should lament it, not cheer it on.

Foster could have used a role in politics to campaign for a more intelligently designed country. Instead he let the opportunity go to waste

Norman Foster resigned from the House of Lords last week. A life peer since 1999, he will retain his title, Lord Foster, but will no longer be able to attend the House of Lords, nor vote there.

Foster's resignation was prompted by a new law banning peers and MPs who are non-resident in the UK, and who decline to pay British tax on incomes earned outside the UK. A spokeswoman for Foster and Partners said: "Lord Foster left the UK several years ago to live with his family in Switzerland. This is common knowledge and he has accordingly declared the fact."

While it's true that Foster has spent precious little time in Barry and Pugin's fairytale Palace of Westminster, it is sad that the House of Lords should lose such an influential figure in the world of architecture. Foster was created a peer for his contribution to British architecture at home and around the globe. It was always unlikely he would have taken time out of his day job to participate actively in the Lords (according to news reports, he last made a speech there seven years ago. The only architect to have done so in recent years, and to some effect, has been Richard Rogers who, as Baron Rogers of Riverside, has sat as a Labour peer in the House of Lords since 1996.

Even so, it is hard not to think "what if?". What if Foster had spent time campaigning as an advocate of the very highest standards of architecture, design and planning? What if he had affected legislation to ensure such standards were set out and followed?

Architects sometimes accept such titles saying they do so for (a) their practice and (b) for architecture itself. Of course they enjoy the prestige, too. And, yet, if they wish to wrap themselves in ermine, and to enjoy the British honours system, then it does seem only right that they should play the game. Architecture has few advocates at a large format political level in Britain, and virtually no one willing and able to cut through party lines to raise the banner for a more intelligently and beautifully planned and designed country. If only Foster had been one.

These buildings are an important part of our landscape – even if they are not used for worship

If churchgoing is a reliable indicator of Christian belief, then England began losing its religious impulse when Victoria was still on the throne. Attendance at Anglican services began its decline in the 1890s. By 1968, only 3.5% of the English population went regularly on a Sunday. By 1999, that figure had halved to 1.9%. And, as the numbers went down, the age of the congregations went up. The average age of a member of the Church of England is 50. In 2015, it is likely to be 55. If present trends continue – a phrase, admittedly, that always invites suspicion – then in 30 years' time two thirds of observing Anglicans will be more than 65 years old, and almost all of them will be women.

The social, constitutional and moral consequences of the church's shrinking importance are often debated, but perhaps the real threat, which all of us can care about, is aesthetic. More numbers: three quarters of England's 16,000 parish churches are listed as buildings of architectural and historic interest in Grades I, II* and II. Churches listed grade I comprise 45% of all England's buildings – castles, mansions, banks, railway stations, markets – in the same first rank. In the words of an official from English Heritage, this means that less than 2% of England's population is directly responsible for the care of nearly half of England's finest architecture.

Public funds have helped the churchgoers. Since 2002, English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund have spent £179m on repairs to listed places of worship of all denominations (but mainly Anglican), and every year another £12m is doled out in grants equivalent to the VAT paid on the work. The fear, for English Heritage and the church, is that a Treasury hungry for cuts won't renew the VAT scheme when it runs out next year. In a report this week, English Heritage reckons that only about one in 10 listed places of worship is in poor condition, but implies that if the cuts come this number will grow. More leaking roofs, more broken stained glass, and then ruin or conversion into flats.

Lincolnshire is a good place to consider these things. "The second largest county in England and the least appreciated," John Betjeman wrote in his Guide to English Parish Churches. The Lincolnshire wool trade, flourishing in the 12th to 15th centuries, left behind a fine stock of medieval naves, chancels, windows and towers; Lincolnshire has 913 buildings listed Grades I and II* and 418 of them were built to be prayed in. Like other rural counties – Herefordshire, Rutland – it has an unusually high number of listed churches per head of population. "A pre-industrial legacy," in the words of this week's report, "means that the cost of maintaining buildings falls to a disproportionately small number of people, mainly in rural areas."

And so it does. Here we are on a lovely morning in Beckingham, near Newark, looking at the Norman architecture of All Saints (Grade I) with the churchwarden, Gill Green, a lively woman who walks with a stick. Some parts of All Saints date from the 12th century and other parts from the 13th to 15th, but all of it was restored in the 19th. The 20th was less kind. Gill Green says that one of its vicars, now dead, took more interest in selling off the glebe land than in the fabric of his church. Feckless vicars often carry the blame for ruination – "There are no problem buildings, just problem owners," says Dale Dishon of English Heritage – but the brutal facts have to be faced. Two hundred people live in Beckingham, a mere nine of whom sit in All Saints at a regular service. The Lincoln diocese tried to make it redundant as a church 10 years ago, but Green and others in the tiny congregation organised a campaign and English Heritage offered a grant for repairs. A rural dean takes services here, a duty he shares with four other churches, all Grade I, but the pipe organ has gone, the tower is unclimbable, the bells untollable, the steam heating broken. Cold keeps the church closed in winter and even in summer damp plaster crumbles at a touch.

A grant has bought a new roof, but other repairs or restorations (of the tower's crocketed pinnacles, say) will need to be funded in other ways. Poverty is forcing churches to open up to the material and secular world, aka "the wider community", partly because state subsidies encourage them in that direction but also because many local people who have never and will never step inside one for religious reasons still see them as important and often beautiful landmarks that give a place a history. These people give just as generously as Anglicans to fundraising projects.

For this reason the phrase "tea point" appears in English Heritage's guidebook for fundseekers. At All Saints they plan to put the tea (and coffee) points, the sink and the toilets at the western end of the nave, just under the tower. Then, in a village without a shop or a school, the church could have all kinds of uses – meetings, talks, and playgroups as well as worship – that would give it a more practical value to the parish. Green's big concern, she says, is "to keep the church going somehow for the glory of God. I'd hate to be the last person who locked the door of a building that has witnessed continuous worship for 900 years".

In Benington, a village of 450 people near Boston, I heard the same: that it was inconceivable to lose a building (another All Saints, Grade I) that for 900 years had provided generation after generation spiritual consolation and pastoral care. In fact, All Saints Benington closed as a church in 2001, but thanks to the work of an enthusiastic local committee it has since been restored as a building for community use where services are permitted six times a year. Many institutions chipped in with money and advice – including English Heritage, the diocese, and the Churches Conservation Trust, a charity funded by the state and the Church Commissioners that looks after churches put to other uses (one has a swimming pool in the nave).

Finally, we drove through the Wolds to Raithby-by-Slingsby, where English Heritage is spending £350,000 on repairs to Holy Trinity: a dark and romantic little church, Grade I, 12th century, extravagantly restored and decorated by a succession of Victorians beginning with George Gilbert Scott in 1873. How many people live in Raithby? About 170. Where is the next nearest Anglican church? About a mile away. Canon Peter Coates, who met us at the lych gate, said this was an area particularly rich in churches – 41 consecrated Anglican buildings and four priests served a population of 10,000. The canon had seven active congregations and one redundant parish under his charge, and it would be fair to assume that some if not all are among the hundreds of Anglican churches that can muster a regular Sunday attendance of no more than 10.

Nothing as handsome as these churches will ever again be built in these villages; their presence there seems almost miraculous, like finding an original Leonardo in a Skegness postcard rack. But how empty they are! Christian worship seems to have melted away almost as completely as the wool trade, and long before Richard Dawkins and the atheist revival came hunting for an argument. We should at least take care to preserve its inspiring remains.

• This article was amended on 5 July 2010. The original referred to medieval knaves, chancels, windows and towers. This has been corrected.

If only Charles had gone into politics. He'd have been a natural wet, and perfect lobby fodder

Suppose that, three decades and more ago, Prince Charles had actually wanted to do what his demons told him. Suppose, up front, renouncing all private letters and salon whispers, he'd become a proper, elected politician: say, the Hon Member for Highgrove or Cornwall West. What would have happened then?

No great ideological problems, perhaps. Charles at the end of the 70s was a natural knight of the shire, which meant – at the dawn of the Thatcher era – being a "wet". He'd have sipped Earl Grey in the tearoom with Jim Prior and Francis Pym, waving to Willie Whitelaw across buttered scones. He'd have given little-reported speeches about social fractures in Britain. He'd have been on Newsnight after the Brixton riots, calling for more cash, more healing, more love and understanding. Archbishop Runcie would have hugged him close. But, look: see the scowl on the Lady's face.

Out, out, damned wets! Charlie MP could probably have slunk through the Falklands. After all, it was our empire, our navy and his brother up there in a chopper. But they play damned good polo in Argentina. He was bound to feel unease. And once Mrs T was in her pomp, rejoicing, roasting old Runcieballs for guilt-dipped sermons, then Charlie would have been doomed to the backbenches. No dreams of becoming a minister of state at agriculture or parliamentary secretary for privileged education. He was to sit at the back, the most docile of lobby fodder, frowning while miners struck (that fractured society bit again), pursing his lips through the Lawson boom (though naturally pocketing its fruits), celebrating in his muted way when some Hezza fellow laid the bloody woman low.

A career reborn? Alas, public and private lives didn't mingle. That simpering blonde wife and two adorable boys he'd featured in his election pamphlets. That passionate old flame with the compliant hubbie who, unlike the flame, always went out. Those horrible stories in the News of the World.

It was so, so distressing, the end of everything surely: and yet, once David Mellor sucked toes and Edwina Currie started bathing with John Major, the circus of shame moved on and he was left, still standing, free to make speeches about saving the landscape for landowners, eating organic pies and pâtés from a neat little food company he'd worked on between wives, and attacking nasty, if renowned, architects building nasty, if renowned, buildings. Somehow the dear wet days of on-one-hand-and-on-the-other were dead and gone for Charlie MP. Now he knew what he didn't like.

But was anybody listening? Not as Ken Livingstone's skyscrapers marched across London. Not as ever younger prime ministers took over in Downing Street. Maybe a word in the right ear would be better than sounding off? Maybe a few letters in green ink could give him the influence he craved? Perhaps coffee with passing emirs – as chairman of the Parliamentary Qatar Friendship Society – might stop that obscene mess near Chelsea Bridge?

Behind the scenes was better than front of house, he thought. Lying low could bring many things he loathed low, too. But then, one bleak morning, he opened the Telegraph and saw his own face frowning out at him. Charlie Windsor in Moated Duck House Cash Claim Horror, the headline howled. Supposed Charities Pushed MP's Personal Passions! Tory Knight's Fingers in Porky Pie!

And so, of course, his career was over. He was back at Highgrove. Maybe if I'd been a prince or something, people would have heard what I had to say, he thought. But politics? Getting elected? Just too much jolly sweat and disappointment. Where on earth could he go now to give speeches nobody wanted to people who didn't listen? Ah yes! Thank God for the House of Lords.

The row over the Chelsea Barracks development scheme exposes the tawdry practices behind planning decisions

Rarely does one want to clasp a judge to one's bosom, but these are my feelings towards Mr Justice Vos. When he said that Prince Charles's intervention in the Chelsea Barracks case was "unexpected and unwelcome", it was wonderful to hear the law speak truth to royalty.

Vos was ruling in the case between Qatari Diar, owners of the barracks, and their former development partner, Christian Candy, following the abandonment of a redevelopment scheme under pressure from the prince. Quite how much pressure was revealed by the case – letters, emails, meetings. There is something rank and slimy about these behind-closed-doors stitch-ups of public matters.

But hold on. We also have to consider the process by which the disputed project came to exist, which had its fair share of the networking by which too much of Britain's architecture and planning is decided.

The scheme was designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, the practice led by Lord Rogers of Riverside. After Ken Livingstone became mayor of London, Rogers became his architectural adviser. With input from Rogers, the London plan was drawn up, which would set the framework for planning decisions in central London.

The plan embodied Livingstone's then view that booming financial services were the future of London and Rogers's belief that high-density development, along with "quality architecture", was the best way to make cities. "Quality architecture" was a bit vague, but one definition soon emerged: it meant almost anything designed by "world-class architects", such as Rogers. It was also defined by committees, such as the design review committee of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, whose membership included other "world-class architects".

Rogers appeared at planning inquiries into contentious projects, including the Shard of Glass designed by his former architectural partner Renzo Piano, and declared them world class. During this period, Rogers's practice dramatically expanded its London portfolio, designing high-density, world-class projects all over the city.

One such was One Hyde Park, a citadel for the megarich in Knightsbridge. Here, Livingstone expressed his support for Rogers. It was necessary, he said, for London's "role as a world city" that the block should rise above the treeline of Hyde Park. Candy and Candy, developers of One Hyde Park, invited Rogers into Chelsea, only for it to founder when the most vocal and best-connected local residents in Britain objected to its density and invited in Prince Charles.

Of course, the success of Rogers Stirk Harbour may be entirely be due to its professionalism, but it is hardly healthy that professionals and politicians should be so intertwined and mutually supportive. We also know that Rogers was prepared to use his own connections, when he urged John Prescott to stop a project by the prince-favoured architect, Quinlan Terry, just across the road from the barracks site.

The prince and the lord, then, seem to be playing similar games, with the important difference that the lord has at least earned his influence with a lifetime of achievement in his field. Practised by either, it stinks. What is left out is an open and fair debate as to what should happen on crucial sites such as Chelsea Barracks.

Our parks are in peril but it's not enough just to save them from funding cuts – great public spaces need events that engage everyone

It is in the best of times that we expect to have great public spaces, but it is in the worst of economic times that we really need them to be great. It is only here that we can escape the stress and strains, take time out from the doom and gloom to play, meet friends, lie (hopefully) in the sunshine or enjoy a staycation. They aren't a luxury but an essential natural health service, the ultimate drop-in centre – preventative healthcare that is far cheaper than the NHS, and without a waiting list.

Shame then that not only will our vital public spaces be among the first to bear the brunt of the cuts – no nice parkies, no more events, planting of flowers, clean toilets, open cafes, grass cutting, litter collection or working fountains – but that those civic squares, now run privately, seem increasingly restrictive of what you can do in a so-called public space.

Try this simple test: lie on one of those ubiquitous monolithic granite benches and see how long it is before you are asked to move (carrying a bottle of beer speeds this up considerably) or sit on a patch of grass. My record for the latter is one minute and 45 seconds before removal – and this was when I was actually judging the space for a competition! And no it didn't win. Now try wearing overalls in one such square – I watched as two gents, who were eating their sandwiches on their break from a nearby construction site, were moved on by the security guard. The management were worried that dust from their overalls might be transferred on to the Hugo Boss suits of office workers when they used the benches. So now we have white-collar spaces, it seems. Shame because if the owners were a bit more community-spirited these spaces could make a really great contribution to our urban street life.

Why the rant? Good spaces are nutrients of urban life. They help keep our heart happy and are a vital ingredient in creating a community where there is tolerance and respect for each other, where the so-called "big society" happens naturally. Yes they may contain nuts, but that's the point – they are for everyone. Our parks and squares and streets are our truly democratic spaces, where all can gather equally and freely to hang out, protest, celebrate and commiserate.

Now I have reservations about John Ruskin (appalling snob, hated contemporary fiction in the greatest age of the novel, weird crushes on nine-year-olds) but he was right when he said that "the measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and its squares". He could have added the measure of our towns, too. By quality, it is the quality of ideas not just materials that counts. The public want variety, too, and the possibility of exciting and interesting things happening.

Right now that might mean temporary screens showing World Cup matches, but it doesn't mean permanent mega TVs dominating squares, sound turned off like in some open-air branch of Currys. Or naff bits of public art (why are they nearly always red?) to brighten up dull grey piazzas. Or as I saw recently, a bronze of children playing leapfrog – where real kids would probably be stopped from doing so for health and safety reasons (keep the real ones in springy, chicken-filled rubber playgrounds, I hear the child-free cry). People want events and art that engage everyone, that don't exclude, that excite and thrill us especially at a time when we all need a bit of cheering up. Like Artichoke's wonderful Sultan's Elephant – magical, awe-inspiring and almost impossible to pull off, given the restrictions imposed.

We need our spaces to be like ourselves: different, distinctive, displaying a range of moods from subdued to very loud. Great open spaces require open minds to design and look after them, to allow culture to flourish, and to support creativity and fun. Dear old Ruskin would approve of that. Pity he can't join our debate at the Tate Modern tonight with Janet Street-Porter, Sir Ian Blair and others.

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

From sugary sculptures to a madcap midnight cycling tour, Jonathan Glancey rounds up 10 festival treats that promise a fresh perspective on the capital

The fourth biennial London Festival of Architecture is an enormous affair, boasting some 300 events in the West End, East End and south London between 20 June and 20 July 2010. These range from the arcane and baffling to walks and cycle rides aimed at opening up fresh perspectives of the miasmic city. I've chosen seven of the best tours (there's no better way of getting to grips with London's architecture than getting on your bike or stepping out), as well as three fixed events as different from one another as St Mary Abchurch is from 30 St Mary Axe.

Dogs for Architecture!

When I turned up to work for the first time in Canary Wharf Tower some 15 years ago, I was refused entry. A pair of jaw-jutting blokes in faux-American security outfits pointed at William, my veteran London mongrel, and said he couldn't come in. Guide dogs only, they said. This dog guides me through London (as through life), I said, hopefully. The guards only looked more aggressive. Odd, I can't help thinking, that so much modern architecture is anti-dog. My favourite City church, St Mary Abchurch, once housed a kennel-like pew especially for four-legged visitors. Luckily, dogs are still welcome in many parts of town, as well as in proper churches, pubs, cafes and offices; so it's good to see a walking tour of architecture in and around Bloomsbury aimed at dogs and their guardians. Even if your bulldog takes against the 60s brutalism of much of the University of London, or your boxer barks disapprovingly at the rebuilt Brunswick Centre, there are graceful Georgian terraces to trot past, Charles Holden's coolly enigmatic Senate House to pad through (well, the lobby anyway) and, best of all, a chance to sniff around Russell Square Gardens as well as Bedford and Bloomsbury Squares while taking in their enthralling skylines.

• Sunday 20 June, 10:30-1:00pm. Only dogs owners and well-behaved dogs need apply. £9.50/£7.50 concession. Please email tours@open-city.org.uk or telephone 0207 383 2131, Mon-Fri 9.30am-6pm (advance booking is essential).

Pimp Your Pavement!

This promises to be an eye-opening event, especially for those with green fingers. Richard Reynolds, author of On Guerrilla Gardening, will lead a 90-minute walking tour of the "guerrilla gardens" of deepest London, SE1 – not tobacco plantations founded by former Cuban revolutionaries, but pavements and urban nooks and crannies where local people have begun to plant and cultivate every spare bit of land. London's streets are in need of trees; but beans, tomatoes, marrows and potatoes (with their beautiful flowers) would make many of them more attractive, too. Central London might have lost all too many of its food markets; now, says Reynolds, it's time to take "guerrilla" action and grow our own. Reynolds would like to show you how.

• Sunday 20 June. For further details, see the Pimp Your Pavement website.

Midsummer Madness

From "Greenwich to Primrose Hill to Bankside via the deserted sleeping city and the Nash boulevards" – and starting at 2am ... This solstice bike ride, organised by Southwark Cyclists, might seem for insomniacs only, and yet this is a fine time to see central London and its architecture. The one and only time, in fact; the streets are almost quiet, and cyclists can look up at their surroundings rather than down and from side to side for raw survival's sake. There is a coffee stop at 3am at Bar Italia, Soho, still almost the only place you can buy a proper cappuccino in London, and which looks pretty much as it did when it opened in 1949. Breakfast is at the Leon bar and café, Canvey Street, immediately behind Tate Modern, which is opening at 6am, specially for cyclists on this ride.

• Monday 21 June. See the London Festival of Architecture (LFA) website for further details.

Building Skywards: Aldgate and City of London Towers

Afternoon and evening walks on three days (23, 24 and 25 June) setting off from Aldgate underground station and taking in the soaring new towers of the City. Actually, the very first of these buildings was Aldgate itself, originally a Roman gateway leading into Londinium from the busy road to Camulodunum (Colchester). Until remarkably recently, the towers and spires of the churches (rebuilt for the most part by Christopher Wren) were the City's "skyscrapers"; today these modest, if sometimes exquisite, buildings seem like toys compared with the enormous towers shooting up in honour of mammon. Sadly, for reasons of business and security, it's not possible to reach the top of the latest towers by Foster, Rogers, Grimshaw, Kohn Pedersen Fox and co, although you could end this tour with a drink in the Vertigo bar at the top of Tower 42, formerly the NatWest Tower, a 70s structural tour-de-force designed by Colonel Richard Seifert and his regiment of commercially astute architects.

• 23, 24 and 25 June. Book through the LFA website.

Birds of Bankside

From earliest childhood until a decade or so ago, one of the things I liked doing best in central London was feeding the sparrows from the bridge spanning the lake in St James's Park. Try this today, though, and you might wait all year. There are several theories as to where all the cockney sparrows have gone (their Parisian cousins appear to thrive); one of mine is that our new, or made-over, buildings are hermetic, defensive things with no nooks and crannies for sparrows to nest. You will be given a more informed answer from Peter Holden, who is leading this early morning walk around Bankside in search of birds and other London wildlife. The tour will also be taking in some new architect-designed nests by 51% Studio on behalf of the Architecture Foundation close to Tate Modern. Holden has worked for the RSPB for 30 years and is author of the authoritative and delightful RSPB Handbook of British Birds.

• Thursday 24 June. Book through the LFA website.

The Green Room

Architects in London, or those hoping to find work in London, have faced very hard times indeed over the past year or so. Few practices have got away without making staff redundant. Chetwood Architects is making a fully serviced room available to architects at its office at 12-13 Clerkenwell Green, opposite the Marx Memorial Library (where Lenin published Iskra) and the Crown Tavern (where the revolutionary was joined for a beer by a young Stalin in 1903). Up to six architects at a time will be able to use the Green Room for a week "to showcase their work, arrange/prepare for meetings and interviews in a relaxed coffee-house-style environment". Employment exchanges have never been quite so alluring. A "prominent display space in Chetwood's front window will showcase selected drawings and designs", says the practice, and given that London is always on the look-out for fresh talent, seats in the Green Room will doubtless be in great demand.

• From Thursday 24 June until a year afterwards. If you believe you have a legitimate reason to use the Green Room, contact Geoff Cunningham.

The Best of France in London with Stephen Bayley

Stephen Bayley – author, critic, curator, bon viveur – leads a bicycle ride through French-influenced London. The tour starts at Michelin House, Fulham Road, the curiously delightful and beautifully restored former headquarters of the Michelin Tyre Company designed by the engineer François Espinasse in a flouncy art nouveau style that belies its radical ferro-concrete structure. From here, Bayley (astride his single-speed, Korean-made, North American Cannondale Capo bicycle) will lead his designer team to Westminster Abbey "to see the influence of Reims, Amiens and Chartres", to the Wallace Collection and its French art and furniture, to Ernö Goldfinger's "homage to Le Corbusier" in Piccadilly (French Tourist Office, 1956), Jean Cocteau's murals in Notre Dame de France in Leicester Place, the French Church in Soho Square and One New Change, a massive new office block by Jean Nouvel in the shadow of the dome of the very English St Paul's Cathedral. Those who survive Bayley's banter and the worst of London traffic will be rewarded with champagne.

• Saturday 26 June. Book through the LFA website.

Restless Cities Walking Tour

LFA invites the adventurous on this "saccadic stroll" led by Esther Leslie, professor of political aesthetics at London's Birkbeck College. Saccadic has something to do with seeing things in a fast-cut way – you're welcome to look it up too – and I think the idea, rooted in Restless Cities, a book of essays published earlier this year by Verso, is that city life is so full of fleeting images, occurrences and ideas that it can be unnerving to walk the streets – or, of course, it can be a wonderfully mind-blowing experience. Anyone who offers you a fresh way of looking at London has to be worth 90 minutes, and I'm sure Leslie will have dreamed up ways of stirring the imaginations of anyone willing to walk on the quasi-philosophical side.

• Sunday 27 June. The LFA website offers no details, but the walk starts at 3pm in front of the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Sugar Cube, Tate Modern

Brendan Jamison has sculpted a copy of Tate Modern in sugar cubes. This sort of thing (such as ships in bottles in Trafalgar Square, or the Forth Bridge reproduced 1:1 scale in matchsticks) is always fun. Built on a scale of 1:100 (the chimney is 3.3ft high), Tate Sweet comprises no fewer than 71,908 cubes – or 52bn individual sugar crystals – that have taken three months to assemble. Other sources tell me that these figures should be revised upwards to more than 80,000 cubes and 60m crystals. Whatever the truth, there is enough sugar here for all the tea served in London in about an hour. I think. If you would like to see how he made this extraordinary architectural confection, Jamison will be running family workshops alongside the model on Saturday 3 July (NEO Bankside pavilion, Hopton Street, opposite the Turbine Hall entrance to Tate Modern). To register for a place, contact neobankside@camronpr.com or call Hannah, Ross or Lizzie at Camron PR on 0207 420 1700. If you attend one of these, you might just want to ask Jamison why on earth he did such a thing in the first place.

1:1 – Architects Build Small Spaces

The V&A's contribution to LFA is this hugely enjoyable exhibition featuring seven imaginative new buildings, each one specially commissioned for the seven miles of corridors within this glorious South Kensington museum. From a fairytale Japanese teahouse on stilts to a pavilion made of geometric acrylic panels in the guise of a computer-imagined tree, here are miniature buildings designed to provoke and delight the imagination.

• At the V&A Museum, London, until 30 August.