It is always a battle to create properly engaging architecture because the combination of design imagination and client profitability is a fundamentally autistic construct. Architects' ability to influence clients and planners is being profoundly eroded by Big Money pedalling trivialised sociocultural "aspirations". It is not the most intelligent architects and cultural informants who decide our future urban tableaux, but Tesco and their replicants.

Glendinning's polemic argues that the "spectacularisation" of architecture creates alienated places and people. Late 20th-century modernist architecture's failure to give form to a humane socio-industrial revolution collapsed in the 1980s and '90s into a veneration of inherently capitalist design geniuses. Their arbitrarily flamboyant buildings have little social or historical integrity.

Glendinning marshals his arguments deftly and his quoted material burns bright.

Here's the architect Peter Eisenman: "We're at the endgame of modernism – you might say we're in the rococo period. Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel – everything is becoming more and more spectacular. And the problem with a society of the spectacular is that it creates passivity."

It's not architectural icons that Glendinning fears most, but the hidden iceberg of decadent causes and effects on which they perch.

What he doesn't emphasise, and perhaps should have, is that many architects are surely bored or depressed about the meaning of design "creativity" in the 21st century. The uber-savvy Rem Koolhaas' response to the violent surf of corporatism and information is to generate equally complex storms of data and architectural form.

"The issue is much more one of planning rather than just architecture," argues Glendinning. "We need to establish flexible frameworks of planned coordination within cities and regions that steer between the alienating planning megalomania of Old Modernism and the scenographic fundamentalism of New Urbanism, with the aim of embedding individual developments in a sense of place."

Alas, the physical form and cultural ambience of many places are already controlled by perceived security issues rather than a yearning for thoroughly considered architectural regeneration, or even basic urban civility.

Architecture's Evil Empire? By Miles Glendinning, Reaktion Books, £14.95