WE SHOULD GET angry about architecture. When was the last decent row we had about the way our cities are developing, about the big glass boxes that seem to be this century’s only contribution to office design, the lack of vision in so much of our urban planning, and the cheap housing that disfigures our suburbs? Why don’t we care enough? In Rome the other day, Richard Meier’s design for the Ara Pacis was publicly burnt in the streets by an enraged critic, who described it as “an indecent cesspit by a useless architect”. Right or wrong, he seized the headlines. We need a few bonfires.

Maybe Will Alsop, rebel architect and a man unafraid of controversy, will stir things up by getting appointed as director of design for London — a new post that is intended to give the capital a coherent vision. He has already announced his intention to challenge what he calls the lack of adventure in the city’s planning. London, in his view, does not reflect the diversity of modern architecture.

This need for an architectural overview is widespread. Edinburgh has appointed Terry Farrell to be its design “champion”. There is a strong case for cities each to have an architect-in-chief, someone with the taste and vision to veto the worst and encourage the best. In reality, however, his powers are always likely to be limited. The days when cities were laid out and designed by powerful men of vision are long gone. We live in the age of the developer, and though a city’s planning department can and does control, modify and even veto the design ideas put forward by commercial organisations, it does not, by and large, dictate them.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in Edinburgh, a city that, as usual this month, is bursting at the seams with visitors whose enjoyment of its festivals is enhanced by the stunning backdrop of its architecture. This is a World Heritage Site, its medieval Old Town miraculously counter-balanced by the 18th-century New Town. The latter’s classically elegant streets and squares represent the largest area of Georgian architecture in Europe, and were a prime example of centralised town planning. Commissioned by an enlightened Lord Provost, and laid out by James Craig, a 22-year-old architect, the design of the buildings and the shape of its broad streets were sacrosanct. Private developers, however, were allowed to design their own space behind the façades, and thus no New Town house inside is entirely the same as another.

These days that approach has been thrown into reverse. It is the developers who produce the master plans, and the city that responds to them. In the heart of the Old Town, where fire ravaged part of the Cowgate — a place of narrow streets, and steep tenement buildings — a multimillion-pound complex of hotels, offices, shops and restaurants is being planned. Closer to Waverley station, another dramatic development, known as the Caltongate, is taking shape, linking the Royal Mile for the first time to the eastern part of the New Town, and aiming to revitalise a previously neglected part of the city. Both are being designed by the Edinburgh-based architect Allan Murray. Meanwhile the redevelopment of the old Royal Infirmary, alongside the university, is being master-minded by Norman Foster, while Farrell is in charge of the Conference Centre and Gareth Hoskins is developing St Andrew Square.

Watching them, with eagle eye, are the city’s conservation bodies, which are sharply critical of some aspects of the plans. They acknowledge some brilliant individual examples of modern architecture, such as the new Scottish Parliament. But Edinburgh has also seen the rise of a financial centre, where glass-bound office blocks of startling anonymity and no obvious context add little to the character of the city; the creation of a sprawling new town along the city’s northern shoreline, where high- density modern housing ignores the elegance and geography of its surroundings; buildings whose height obliterates the views that are Edinburgh’s speciality; some pastiche buildings of utter mediocrity. Because the city’s planning department has neither power nor resources, it can only comment on and amend the plans as they take shape. The city can, and does, publish guidelines and strategies for areas of redevelopment. But it does not control the designs.

Some think this piecemeal progress is evidence of organic growth — that the city has always changed in fits and starts and that, for all its uneven qualities, Edinburgh’s buildings exhibit energy and variety. But for a city whose architecture defines its character, the absence of a central vision, and of the powers that would allow the planners to be ahead of the game rather than behind it, are a loss. The fierce controversy that surrounded the Scottish Parliament building has not given rise to a more wideranging debate about the role and influence of architecture in the city. Instead of becoming participants, the citizens of Edinburgh are reduced to the role of passive onlookers.

This is a disservice as much to the architects as to those who will use their buildings. Good architecture depends on an enthusiastic clientele as well as an enlightened designer. Without that engagement, both suffer. Back in the 18th century, as Edinburgh’s New Town took shape, there were rumbustious debates in the coffee houses and taverns of the town about the merits or otherwise of its buildings. That debate should be rekindled, for what is happening now may turn out to be every bit as important for the Athens of the North as the original vision that created it.

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