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Cities are built with words as much as asphalt or steel. A vital metropolis has boulevards of talk, civic complexes of argument, soaring towers of financial reports, long commuter lines of bored babble, and un-expected mini-parks of poetry. The visuals — the architecture, the stuff that gets built or left out — is just the residue from streets shaped by talk.

The past year has seen a debate about cities on a scale scarcely imagined before. Indicative of the shift was the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Previous Biennales were dedicated to exhibiting portfolios of buildings from the architects of the moment, others the blobby new organic architecture, some mountings featured metaphysical manifestos for un-built paper architecture, other years highlighted tasty High Tech, but never, not in three decades, did the exhibition focus on cities.

Last September's massive Venice exhibition was different, dedicated to comparative analysis of the world's major urban hubs, showcasing innovative ideas for housing, transport, public space, densification and energy efficiency collected there. A review of Vancouver conceptual architect Bill Pechet's Sweaterlodge installation there formed the first "Dwelling" column, almost precisely one year ago.

A smaller and more focused version of the Venice exhibition had a second life as "Global Cities," a major summer 2007 exhibition at London's Tate Modern. With models, photographs and projections filling the entire turbine hall there, the show got a buzz going in the British capital about future options for cities. The show examined 10 of the world's largest, if not necessarily most interesting cities: Johannesburg, Cairo, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Tokyo, Shanghai, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and of course, London. Particularly interesting were large conceptual models which graphically blew away conventional thinking about which of these cities are dense, and which are not.

Linked to the Tate Modern exhibition was a series entitled the Great London Debates, where citizens were invited to evening discussions on topics like Can London Be Both Big and Beautiful, and How Can a Boomtown Be Green. In action, these were less real "debates" for the general public than art-world panels top-heavy with star architects like Pritzker prize winner Zaha Hadid, her mentor and Seattle Public Library designer Rem Koolhaas, and High Tech innovator Richard Rogers. Not to be outdone, La gloire de la France is promoted in huge new galleries I previewed in the run-up to next month's official opening of the world's largest architectural and urban history museum — in the Palais de Chaillot, facing the Eiffel Tower.

In terms of getting citizens talking-about and actively-shaping their city, more effective than the London and Paris offerings is the Changing Copenhagen exhibition on through the end of October at the Danish Architecture Centre. This show is not an arty little gallery bon-bon for the architectural cognoscenti. According to the D.A.C.'s dynamic new director, Kent Martinussen, "We almost closed because we were just making exhibitions for a few architects, not the public." Accordingly, the show Mr. Martinussen co-curated is populist in the best sense of the term, using a variety of media to document the mainly-waterfront zones where the Danish metropole is morphing from a quiet Nordic regional centre into a global metropolis.

The show is organized area-by-area, and D.A.C. puts on regular walking tours to each zone by experts, has an active program for school children, even provides downloadable pod-casts for wanting-to-wander flaneurs of the MP3 generation. Not just because it has consumed much of his energy and that of his staff of 42 for several years, Mr. Martinussen suggests Changing Copenhagen is opening up a dialogue on the Danish capital's future, an intellectual and emotional investment by the public in city-building that will only do good.

That's right: this institution doing research, exhibitions, public programs and promoting architectural competitions has a staff of 42, in a city smaller than Vancouver in a country with a population less than Toronto's.

From our side, the Architectural Institute of British Columbia's tiny gallery on Victory Square is run by volunteers with a microscopic budget. In fits and starts, the Vancouver Art Gallery dabbles in architectural exhibitions, successfully in their mid-1990s New Spirit show on Vancouver modernism, plus their Lang Wilson Practice in Architectural Culture installation a few years ago, but much more problematically in last year's ill-focused show on some of Arthur Erickson's buildings. Moreover, VAG has no curator of architecture and design, nor does any other gallery in Western Canada. No institution in British Columbia collects architectural drawings, so the visual records of our nation-leading designers go to archives in Calgary and Montreal.

Moreover, the D.A.C. bookstore features dozens of books — in both Danish and English — on recent architecture and urbanism in their city and country. In Vancouver, Hal Kalman's fine guidebook to the city's architecture went out of print years ago, so it is difficult for the general public to understand who built contemporary Vancouver, much less shape its urban future.

There may be a reason for this neglect. In the absence of a more mature literature, the way Vancouverites talk and think about their city is shaped instead by the promotional literature of our real estate industry. Instead of scholars, critics and community advocates probing the character of our city-building, we have advertising copy writers, slick brochure designers and the interior decorators of lavish pre-sales show suites.

Even our politicians and senior urban planners fall victim to this promotional hype, spouting "our city is the best" boilerplate boasts when they should be talking straight about what's right and what's wrong in this town. Simon Fraser University's City Program often falls into the same self-congratulating trap, and many of its courses seem more dedicated to promoting the New Urbanism than understanding and building the New Vancouver.

The predominance of rose-coloured visions borrowed from real estate promotion is one reason Vancouver has been so slow in coming to terms with the mounting urban tragedy of the Downtown Eastside. Because slums are so seldom included in condo brochures, we simply do not talk about them. The problem here is not our developers and their marketers and copy-writers — they do what they do well, and Vancouver has led the world in real estate marketing innovations.

The problem rather is with our governments, universities, cultural institutions and professional organizations for not investing in thoughtful talk about Vancouver. Led by London, Paris and even Copenhagen, the world's leading cities are having gab-fests about their towns. Vancouver, one of the urban world's great hotbeds of civic improvement, needs to start talking — and listening, too.