The punk biennale: this year's Venice Biennale eschewed the usual trophy architecture in pursuit of the soul of the city, with mixed results.

As The Long Blondes, Sheffield's post-punk finest, thrashed energetically underneath the Neo-Classical portico of the British Pavilion and an audience of the international design press guzzled beer in the humid September sunshine, all felt momentarily right with the world. It could only be Venice, that perpetually gaudy, deceptively beguiling stage for curatorial ambition and enterprise. Never mind that this year's Arsenale show on cities was as dry as a ship's biscuit, the gaiety of nations in the Giardini took up Signor Burdett's theme of global urban existence (and the social, economic and architectural challenges thereof) con brio. The outcome, as ever, was diverting and infuriating in equal measure.

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Architecture biennales have traditionally thrived on spectacle rather than issues, so it was a boldly optimistic move to try and conjure a sense of engagement with how and why cities, from Pyongyang to Sheffield, are evolving. Given the immense (and to most European eyes unfamiliar and unfathomable) pressures on places such as Caracas, Johannesburg and Shanghai, the conventional role of the architect as a purveyor of tasteful, set-piece buildings seems hopelessly redundant, swept aside by a tidal wave of unfettered expansion (Mexico City's depressingly infinite suburbs) and the social scourges of crime (Sao Paulo), disease (Johannesburg's HIV epidemic) and crippling poverty (most everywhere else).

In the cavernous former ropemaking shed of the Arsenale, 16 cities from four continents were assembled on a compare and contrast basis, with facts, figures and three-dimensional density models (resembling giant mutant stalagmites), so if you were paying attention, you came away knowing by exactly what percentage Bogota's population had expanded over the last 10 years, but the geographer's zeal to flatten everything out into comparable statistics made for a somewhat reductive viewing experience. Far more compelling were the assortment of shows in the Italian Pavilion, which had a less obviously curated, strange bedfellow quality. Here you could explore different sorts of urban phenomena, from shrinking cities (Leipzig, Detroit, Manchester) and Ireland's fast breeding SuperRural landscape (the terrifying suburbanisation of the Emerald Isle), to a video survey of totalitarian Pyongyang, perhaps the Biennale's most physically inaccessible city, in the absence of the Baghdad war zone.

Meanwhile, in the plethora of national pavilions scattered around the Giardini, there were some obvious standouts. The USA tackled New Orleans, pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina, a meteorological cataclysm that proved a shocking reminder of the power of nature to grimly prevail over the manmade. Time-lapse satellite shots showed Katrina's lethal swirl of cloud gaining in size and momentum until it slammed into the Gulf Coast with catastrophic results. Here again, the artist/architect was a largely impotent spectator, and well-meaning proposals for single family housing to replace devastated areas will clearly need both political will and financial backing to stand any chance of becoming reality. Representing Japan, Terunobu Fujimori and his quixotic Roadway Observation Society sought out the surreal, unconscious spirit of the city (a staircase to nowhere and a charming chicken television).

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Spain, which could usually be relied upon to deliver, was curiously understated this year, opting for a series of female talking heads on video screens (Spain has a feminine pronoun in Spanish), but the general effect was that of the ground floor of a major department store, with its acreage of cosmetics counters. However, in Sverre Fehn's perpetually ravishing Nordic pavilion, Norway, Sweden and Finland did not disappoint, presenting a study of Arctic cities Tromso, Kiruna and Oulu (slyly described as the Venice of the North), which examined the effects of the warming of the polar ice cap among more mundane development pressures.

At the heavy hitting end of the Giardini, France, Britain and Germany squared up to each other in a who-blinks-first fest of anarchy and gesture. France cobbled together a series of scaffolding structures that penetrated the pavilion like a bizarre work in progress, all part of its 'atypical occupation of space', while Germany featured a red staircase winding up to a rooftop cafe. Inside, the theme was 'modes of densification and dissolving boundaries', which roughly translated as having a butcher's at the evolving character of the post-industrial German city. And finally to Sheffield, representing Gran Bretagna, which for a brief, blessed and paradoxical moment will be the toast of La Serenissima. Curator Jeremy Till attempted to evoke the flavour and nuances of a gritty regional outpost slightly down on its luck now that its heavy industry is defunct and its Modernist utopias have collapsed. There's nowt much architecturally, but somehow it still endures. It was, perhaps, suspiciously sleek compared with the real thing, but after all Venice, both city and Biennale, is nothing if not about the seductive power of artifice.

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