As culture becomes completely commodified, wrote Guy Debord, “it tends to become the star commodity of spectacular society”. Writing in 1967, Debord essentially reworked Marx’s definitions of commodity fetishism to predict a “Society of Spectacle” in which culture and commerce combine to create cities of concentrated consumption. Could he have been more right?

Any city with ambitions beyond its own fuzzy edges promotes itself as a destination for culture or shopping. If cities once established themselves through industry or trade, with courts, culture or cathedrals, now they take the short cut and call on the international starchitects to create a chunk of instant culture-cred.

The cultural quarter has become de rigueur for any city, new or old. Bilbao kicked off the trend a decade ago when the fading Basque rust-belt city commissioned Frank Gehry to build it a Guggenheim. Snatching the institution from under the noses of cities that just weren’t trying hard enough, Bilbao was revitalised in a single blow by Gehry’s billowing, titanium-clad heap. In fact, the city had undergone an intelligent and integrated series of urban renewals (including a metro network by Norman Foster), but the myth of the lonesome cowboy stuck: Gehry had rescued the city single-handedly and the phenomenon was dubbed the “Bilbao Effect”.

The US, virtually immune to architectural innovation for a generation, took notice. This decade has seen almost every major US city seek out its own icon. Cities that were beginning to see a trickle of inhabitants back into their neglected downtowns have tried to jump-start urban regeneration through the creation of public monuments. A small clique of international architects – Gehry, of course, but also Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Santiago Calatrava – carved a seam of gleaming new arts buildings running through the centres of cities flattered finally to hit na-tional and international headlines. Unlikely Midwestern cities such as Des Moines, Cincinnati, Davenport, Akron and Milwaukee suddenly dominated the architecture press and appeared in in-flight magazines. Culture became the way these cities could enjoy their brief moment in the spotlight and convince themselves they were changing. A single gesture, an extravagant building, often funded by local philanthropy, appeared a cheap way of kick-starting regeneration – far easier and cheaper than addressing social or housing problems.

The rest of the world did likewise. London managed a huge shift from fusty second-tier antiques centre to art powerhouse. If smaller cities needed to commission striking, gleaming, metal-clad monuments, the big, world cities had plenty of looming hulks huddled in the centres just waiting to be filled with art and culture. Tate Modern, a once defunct power station contained within a mountain of brick, became the most visited museum of modern art in the world.

London, though, is a wealthy and populous city with a flood of tourists and transients. When the same trick was tried at the Baltic Flour Mills in Gateshead, northern England, the results proved radically different. The audience, it seems, is simply not there, and subsequent directors have struggled to fill the space. The Walsall Art Gallery, designed by Caruso St John and one of the few genuinely fine pieces of public architecture of Britain’s postwar era, is also suffering. Provincial icons have yet to prove themselves in Britain’s centralised cultural climate. In Germany, where an entrenched federal system has managed to maintain an enduring bourgeois civic pride, cultural buildings have been used in the same way as in the US rust belt. A blend of long-term government commitment and an established culture of corporate cities provides a solid base for big new institu-tions. Volkswagen, for example, supported the extraordinary Phaeno science museum in its home town of Wolfsburg. Designed by British-based Zaha Hadid, the building is futuristic but tough and successfully melds the industrial and the urbane sections of the city.

Germany, unlike most other countries, has a track record here. In the rush to rebuild its devastated cities, the nation placed culture on a pedestal. The first new buildings to be built in Cologne after the second world war were museums – big, serious museums at that. Frankfurt launched a con-certed and largely successful effort to build a cultural quarter, which became the template for the cultural catwalk approach, displaying the works of a collection of international superstars. Berlin’s Museum Island (masterplanned by David Chipperfield) is a substantial architectural effort from a city that hardly needs more culture – yet just keeps on building.

Meanwhile, Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, architects of Tate’s transformation, are converting an aircraft carrier-sized warehouse in Hamburg into a philharmonic hall. It is an ambitious and intelligent scheme that illustrates the influence of Tate in opening up the industrial, waterfront heart of a city.

Tate Modern revealed a subtler method of urban intervention than the big, sparkly new building. The conversion of hulking industrial structures al-lows a continuity of typology. Cities can maintain the ghosts of the buildings that manufactured their wealth and power and the elision of production from manufacture to culture constitutes a powerful comment on the function of the contemporary city.

The constricted, post-industrial centres of old cities fade into obscurity, however, when compared with the vast, outrageously ambitious visions rising from deserts and marshes in the emerging cultural markets. The world’s energy economies are turning to culture to anchor their sprouting but still insecure cities. Wary of a post-fossil fuel future and insecure about the attractiveness of new cities, yet anxious to invest substantial wealth, cultural building now provides a universal justification, an existential urban sop.

Guangzhou in southern China will have an extravagant new opera house designed by Hadid. Kazakhstan’s new capital, Astana, has a pyramid of peace arts complex in the form of a glass mountain created by Lord Foster. It is a piece of astonishing kitsch containing both debating hall (in a country with no debate) and opera house. Kazakhstan’s former capital, Almaty, is getting a new museum by US superstar Eric Owen Moss. Moss is also building an opera house and museum in Guangzhou. Nanjing is to have a museum of art and architecture courtesy of another American, Ste-ven Holl, while Shanghai is to have an Oriental Art Museum by France’s Paul Andreu.

But the pre-eminent example of this emerging genre is Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island. The ambition of Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan is noth-ing less than to reconcile western and eastern cultures. “The aim of Saadiyat Island,” he says, “must be to create a cultural asset for the world; a gateway and beacon for cultural experience and exchange”.

To achieve this, he has gathered together an impressive roster of eager architects. You can feel the electricity generated by the rubbing together of palms.

At the tip of the island will be Hadid’s Performing Arts Centre, a seductive, curvaceous building with walls as diaphanous as a fly’s wings. The complex will be anchored by two big art franchises. Gehry’s proven Guggenheim formula in another characteristically billowing shell is the first. The second is the rather more surprising translation of the Louvre. A convoluted structure, a city in itself, by Jean Nouvel sits beneath a shallow dome woven from a web of strands into an infinitely complex parasol. It looks like grillage on an overpriced dessert, but rather beautiful. Then there is the maritime museum by Japanese architect Tadao Ando, a stripped-down bridge above a cavernous aquarium. On top of all this is an ambitious plan for a biennial, complete with national pavilions designed by some more of the biggest names in architecture – Americans Greg Lynne and Hani Rashid, Britain’s David Adjaye and China’s Pei-Zhu.

The ambition and scale of Saadiyat Island indicate the importance attached to culture in the establishing of new cities, but it also highlights some of the problems. The importing of famous architects and franchised museums is leading to a rapid homogenisation of culture. The increasing promi-nence of commerce in western arts institutions – the foregrounding of shops, cafés and restaurants – has already led to the “mallification” of the museum. Arts institutions increasingly resemble branded shopping centres.

Culture is capable of defining the local in dialogue with, and occasionally in opposition to, the international but it remains to be seen whether this will emerge. In the United Arab Emirates, the local Islamic culture has been purposely veiled to allow western culture (everything from banking and business to arts and entertainment) to flourish. It can sound churlish to criticise a proposal that brings together some of the world’s greatest archi-tects and art collections in a concentrated burst of activity but the question remains: can culture be created in this way?

Perhaps culture is something more complex, more nuanced. People travel to the theatre in London, the fashion and furniture in Milan, the art and architecture in Venice because these cities have become imbued with the spirit of place, the genius loci. The fact that luxury brands remain recog-nisable and yet desirable through their presence in the avenues and airports of every major world city has led us to assume that culture too (often sponsored by those same luxury brands) can be transported without losing its integrity, meaning or value. Architects are in danger of marketing themselves as brands.

Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture have taken up a typically contrary stance. Interpreting western disdain for Middle Eastern efforts as a kind of snobbery, Koolhaas sees instead an opportunity to depart from the western models of cities and culture and create something new. So much is being built and so fast, his argument goes, that we can afford to make a few mistakes along the way. This, he believes is the 21st century’s big opportunity to try out new things: flexible cities, in which the resort and the theme park displace Venice, Paris or New York as the models for urban development. In his masterplan for Ras Al Khaimah, we will see how right one of the most perceptive and brilliant of con-temporary cultural minds will be. OMA’s design for a culture and convention centre in the emirate has been described as resembling the Death Star.

The modernists predicted the death of the museum a century ago. The argument was that as we lived more in the present and the art of our own age became ever more overwhelming, the yearning for the past would disappear. In fact, the opposite has happened and the museum has instead become an arm of global capital, with contemporary art treated as a pivotal commodity. Architects and urbanists are nearly all failing in their re-sponsibility to question what they are doing as they fall over themselves to build ever more outrageous and extravagant structures, increasingly ignoring the artefacts they are meant to house.

Architecture for culture has become a simple language of symbols and signatures and while some, perhaps many, of these proposed buildings may be masterpieces, you can’t help but fear an emptiness inside them. That hollowed-out feeling is the collapse of ideology, the dearth of ideas beyond the formal and the physical. Buildings, once they descend into theatrical shapes, lose their soul, their connection with the broader world and they have nothing to say but “look at me”.

Debord’s prediction about the society of spectacle has come inevitably, but occasionally frighteningly, true.