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I love the Barbican, its design and scale. It鈥檚 a very thoughtful building where everything has been considered, down to the door handles and the fire hose reels. It welcomes people in and encourages them to attend events by mixing 鈥渃ulture鈥� with retail, residential and civic architecture.

But it鈥檚 about more than that: it succeeds in stitching a recent addition into a very old part of London, Cripplegate, and successfully incorporating existing elements: a medieval church, a Roman wall and historic street layout. It could have been alien, but the designers took care to make it work, bringing new forms, geometry, materials and density - and water - into the old city core. With its gardens, it manages to become a 鈥減lace鈥�, with everything that suggests.

Today, it probably would not have been built over a car park, but times have changed. It鈥檚 still special.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai. I hate the idea of changing the shape of the planet just for marketing purposes. Like the rest of Dubai, it鈥檚 a non-design, non-place. It鈥檚 been plonked down and imposed.

All decisions here seem to have been made based on who鈥檚 the biggest brand and there is no context apart from tax-free development and luxury.

Nobody has thought about sustainability. There is no public transport. All the water is bottled or from treated seawater. There is no sewerage system, but each building has a septic tank, emptied by lorries. However, the queue for the treatment plant is so long that the lorry drivers often get bored and dump the waste, which ends up in the sea. It epitomises everything I hate about unsustainable city futures.

Billy Reading is English Heritage鈥檚 buildings inspector for Westminster and west London