Peter Cook.

Leon van Schaik's new book* is provocatively titled Design City Melbourne and as soon as you get inside it, the provocation makes itself quite clear: he reminds us that Graz was 'hot' in the 1970s, Barcelona in the 1980s, the Dutch Randstadt in the 1990s.

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He is a brilliant, complex and crafty character, who uses the opportunity of the book to expose some facets of the design world where 'high' style, waspish chatter and edgy competitiveness wrap around each other's antennae. The new buildings are certainly sophisticated and engaging, but are accessed through an exposure of the key protagonists who are photographed in studios, cafes and gatherings with walk-on parts for friends and family--making Melbourne seem much smaller than its three million people. At the same time this helps to give clues to the dynamics involved. Furthermore, the trick here is that the key mover happens to be the commentator himself who (we hear), still wheedles those with power, money and influence into commissioning spunky architects.

It is as if Adolf Loos of the 1900s could have brought himself to pen a gossipy tome with asides (if it could happen within an Austrian psychology that instinctively needs blood to be drawn for creativity to take place). You remain fascinated by reputation and myth that lasts for so long that tiny pieces of Loos-like formalism appear in Co-op Himmelb(l)au's bird-like rooftop of the 1990s. He haunts them still and it can be argued that Vienna remains one of the world's most architecture-conscious cities, with wild designers and picky critics. So atmospheres drift on way beyond the shelf-life of the mannerisms involved and we surely have to recognise the value of the 'masseur'.

Where would Helsinki have been in the last 25 years without Juhani Pallasmaa? Running an architecture museum that could have just remained a room for soirees and vernissages, he seized the initiative, dug up unfashionable names and odd pieces of history and then massaged-in some new names. He was the first to push forward seriously the name of one Daniel Libeskind.

To what extent the seizure of power brings a city towards the state of high idea-exchange is something that you will certainly never get the protagonists to agree about. Certainly Oriol Bohigas was well placed in the Barcelona of the 1970s, with municipal, academic and professional mandates brought together and successively used. I have no doubt that he has enjoyed the cut-and-thrust between some wonderful characters, culminating (whether he liked it or not) in the heady output of the late Enric Miralles. Yet ironically Gaudi has remained of Barcelona whereas Miralles was from Barcelona. In a sense this anticipated the galloping phenomenon in which a Seattle or Oporto could get Rem Koolhaas and feed from the magic of a Rotterdam--London axis, or Berlin could import a full-blooded Parisian sophistication via a Jean Nouvel store and a stadium from Dominique Perrault down the street.

But back to Leon's book and a key declaration: that he actively turned his back on the business of bringing in those 'visiting firemen' who are always used to make a local scene look as if it is part of the big-time. Instead, he built up a confidence among the locals to believe that they had something special. As I have reported before, in Melbourne's case it worked. As it had back in Graz where the useful personality of Dieter Dreipolz, an architect who had become a local government official could (while the socialists were in power}, massage as many naughty buildings into the district as there was talent to go round. The almost artificial creation of a 'Grazer Schule', bouncing off the undoubted talent of Gunther Domenig, was its manifestation. Knowing it, and landing our blue 'ship' in among it, forced Colin Fournier and myself to consciously up our game and parry it with an alternative.

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So here I come to another layer in the conversation: High Architecture is about respect as much as it is about ambition.

Alvin Boyarsky, chairman of the AA in the 1980s and 1990s understood this very well. He had little power within London nor within the system, yet he converted the school itself into a powerhouse, an agency and a virtual city-within-a-city. A kind of Vatican where all believers--world-wide--could have reference to the existence of an architectural cutting-edge. Pretty soon it generated respect, envy and, most important, a distinctive generative power that rolls on long after the demise of Boyarsky himself and far beyond London or even the English-speaking world.

So we continue to seek clues, not always having a guide as canny as van Schaik. We back hunches: could not Portland Oregon, Hamburg, Valencia, Auckland, Islamabad become 'design cities'? For years I have been approached by recent graduates who ask you where they should work, where they should move, what is the most important recipe for success? I am forced towards a far-from-populist response: namely that it matters most who you hang out with. Design cities are hang-outs where a few people subscribe to the chancy, the less comfortable and to the creativity of intriguingness.

*Design City Melbourne, by Leon van Schaik. Photographs by John Collings. London: Wiley-Academy, 2006.