City architecture: politics and its architectural consequences featured heavily at the Venice Biennale.

Is good city-making possible within the context of conventional 'democratic' politics? This hardly elaborated proposition informed at least some of the debate during a biennale which, for the many interested in the future of cities, was brave, bold and successful. It was also provocative: the OMA/AMO exhibit on Dubai challenged the prevalent idea that it is a ghastly Las Vegas without the gambling, noting that much of the criticism of its emerging form was a Caliban-like howl from those who have been responsible in the West for what Dubai has writ large in the Gulf.

Rem Koolhaas, invited to pick his favourite current cities, didn't choose Cuba, but did express a fondness for Lagos and Kuwait City, the love affair with southern China's emerging new towns apparently over. In none of these places does democracy feature very significantly, and even if Rotterdam also made his list of favourites, that was because strong governance had been required to rebuild it post-war. Mr K was speaking at a packed British Council symposium in the Palazzo Contarini, on a panel which included David Chipperfield and Nick Johnson from Urban Splash, each of whom referred to the difficulty of getting anything done under conventional planning regimes. Johnson wittily observed that to be successful, and to give people what they very obviously wanted, he had to be 'irresponsible, unprofessional and unaccountable'. Chipperfield welcomed the relative freeing up of planning in London, but noted that in order really to achieve something specific within certain time frames, you needed a dirigiste authority to bring it about--for example the Olympic Delivery Authority.

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Sitting in Venice, one cannot but be conscious of the authoritarian history which produced this miraculous city; having dinner in the Doge's Palace on the first night of the opening could only emphasise the point. Many of the diners had taken part in the 'City workshop', including contributions from the mayors of Venice and Turin, a six-hour marathon which tackled issues raised by Ricky Burdett's Arsenale show. It seemed incredible, but as a brilliant keynote speaker Saskia Sassen reminded us, it is only 20 years since various sages were predicting the end of cities, not the extraordinary growth which the Biennale both celebrates and sounds alarm bells over. We were also reminded that Mao predicted the end of cities as the countryside expanded.

For Sassen, the nature of public space had increasingly become political because cities were no longer controlled by crown or bourgeois state, but nor were they owned by the organised working class (extraordinarily refreshing to hear 'class' mentioned for once). So how could we deal with this 'time of unsettlement'? How can we inhabit huge infrastructures? How can disciplined urban interventions (presumably by many of the delegates) chime with the welcome messiness of city life? It was suggested that the future of cities will not be the result of deduction but invention, even though we are quick to deduce and slow to invent. Invention was about the new, not what was deemed to be necessary. There was an assumption that mayors, would be crucial to initiating and exploiting this process.

The Burdett biennale was not about architectural invention as usually understood, and this prompted some outspoken criticism, particularly at the late-night crits organised by the AR and architectural impresario Robert White, in the Palazzo Contarini. 'J'accuse Ricky Burdett,' announced Odile Decq, who (like Cook) found the Arsenale show devoid of the sort of architectural content they love to see. For Cook, it was a question of the schoolmaster taking over from the joyful (see p40). But this was not a universal view. In the context of reviewing work by younger architects, a series of critics across three nights reflected on themes in the biennale and the world beyond, and it became clear that (on balance) more had found the biennale a stimulus than not. There was plenty of an 'architectural' nature to see, not just in the national pavilions (the Dutch, Japanese, Chinese and, Hungarian for example) but in the one off exhibits that always surround the Arsenale main show. This year a marvellous small exhibition of the proposed railway stations for Naples and the region beyond provided excellent models and drawings, while the Arup proposal for Dongtan Island was presented

with a mixture of art, sculpture, water, light and fish--as delightful as it was unexpected. Major projects by Foster and Piano managed to find significant space, while the rather spooky City of Stone exhibit catered for those who like their music frozen.

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But there was no getting away from the biennale's central theme, emphasised as Richard Rogers received the Golden Lion award on the final morning of the opening, with lengthy speeches from the Italians, short ones from Ricky, and British culture secretary Tessa Jowell, and a sweet tribute from Renzo. (All without the benefit of a single image of the Rogers oeuvre, a curiosity of this award which should surely be amended. We could have done with some of the terrific photography in the international pavilion curated by Elena Foster.)

The fact is that the biennale has forced architects to address, whether by commission or omission, the question of their role in the extraordinary growth in cities in general, and the 16 that featured in the biennale in particular. In commenting on the difference between the picturesque and the sublime (impossible to avoid in La Serenissima), Brian Hatton struck a chord, and as he noted, the subject of mega cities had been the theme of the 1987 Milan Triennale, with little noticeable impact. Perhaps this time round it will be different and the thought occurred that the next biennale might pick up where this one left off, by looking at local architecture. As Aaron Betsky put it, 'We have to find ways of telling good stories about numbers'. P.F.