Venice is an absurd city, a city of incomparable loveliness sinking into its own stinking canals, a city in which, as Italo Calvino points out in his Invisible Cities, we can see anything we want reflected, from decadence to decay, immorality to sublime beauty. It is the proto-heritage city, the first urban theme park, a city insistent on exhibiting itself and one that exists more in the imagination and memory than it does in reality. It is, then, the most potent place to hold architecture’s biggest visionary event and even more perfect that it should host this year’s particular theme of cities.

The Architecture Biennale has, for a generation now, been a forum for newness, the place where professionals pick up on the new theories, aesthetics and ideas from around the world, a place where architects can congratulate themselves. When it began two decades ago architects were supremely unpopular, widely perceived as intent on destroying all that was beautiful and humane. They needed to gather to convince themselves they had something to contribute, that someone was listening. Since then they have become celebrities and pop-heroes, jet-setting superstarchitects single-handedly reviving post-industrial wastelands, reinvigorating city-centres, transforming slums into photo-shoot penthouses.