Charles is right - deflate these egos

Prince Charles is still the nutty one in the Royal chocolate box. Bite through the goo and you hit solid protein. This time he has gone personal. Architects riding the London property boom, he said on Tuesday, are a bunch of "inflated egos". They were building to "make statements rather than for the benefit of the community". They were taking "commercial macho into the realms of adolescent lunacy".

Inflated egos? Adolescent lunacy? Surely he cannot mean our Lords Foster and Rogers, Barons Gherkin and Paddington Basin respectively. The heir to the throne cannot imply that his mother ennobled them simply for being rich. Yet he gave no quarter. He spoke of "phallic structures and depressingly predictable antennae". He derided so-called planning gain from these phalluses as "turds in every plaza".

The Prince of Wales once drew a distinction in his campaigning between controversy and party-political controversy. The former he saw as permissible, the latter not. As long as organic farming, alternative medicine and architecture were outside party manifestos, he was in the clear. But let Labour fight Tory on anything and mum's the word. It is a distinction to which he has carefully adhered.

I am glad it does not apply to local government. The egos are at present colluding with property developers, the Mayor and the City of London boss, Judith Mayhew, to push as many skyscrapers into the air as they can before the boom collapses. This it is doing. "Glut of empty offices fuels recession fear" was a headline in this week's Times. Demand for London office space is half what it was in July. The glut is the worst in five years, according to the monitoring firm, DTZ. Canary Wharf will soon be "see-through" again.

The Prince of Wales is right for two reasons, the one commercial, the other aesthetic. There is no "necessity" for London to build gigantic high rises, some of them taller than Canary Wharf in the centre of London. There are hundreds of acres of undeveloped or underdeveloped land on which high-density offices can be built without disfiguring the skyline. I will oblige any panicking planner with a drive north, south, east or even west. No city "needs" skyscrapers. Some of its citizensmay want them, but that is different.

Planners always confuse need with demand, as if Lenin never died. At a tall buildings seminar last week at LSE, an owner was asked what he would do if he could not get the skyscraper he claimed to need. Would he move to Frankfurt? He laughed and said he would make do. He loved London. The bankers crowding low-rise Westminster, and paying higher rents than in the gloomy City, do so because Westminster has guarded its environment and not capitulated to short-term gain. Its rate base has not suffered. Central London tenants want quality. Quantity can go out of town.

Mr Livingstone, Ms Mayhew and the egos have, of course, differing motives. The Mayor wants totems, emblems of his term of office. Strapped for cash, he also wants the "public-sector bribes" that can be wrung from developers to spend elsewhere. The City has a cruder motive. It wants to ward off Canary Wharf, which it absurdly sees as a greater threat than Frankfurt or New York. The architects want money, which is fair enough if they do not pretend otherwise.

The Mayor last October issued a document which purported to be his case for more high buildings. Apart from low-rise Broadgate, the Mayor protested that there were "no equivalent opportunities" for such modern development elsewhere. He had to build high.

If Mr Livingstone only broke away from his new love affair with the City, he could visit Shoreditch, King's Cross, Waterloo, World's End, Paddington, Stratford, Royal Oak, Clapham, Woolwich. He is Mayor of them too. They need development. He should venture outside plutocratic congestioncharge London. Merely because a developer wants a " prestige" site does not mean planners must find one. The firm Swiss Re demanded the gherkin, according to the Mayor, because of "its need for prestige". Prestige is a passing fad, not a planning requirement. Will the gherkin come down if Swiss Re does not want it after all?

While many might have reservations about Canary Wharf's local impact, it is an undeniable planning success. If London developers want such structures, they should be directed away from historic areas of urban activity. The health of the city as a whole is the issue. Otherwise why have planning?

Aesthetics do matter, even if people disagree about them.

In a MORI poll last summer, Londoners were overwhelmingly hostile to tall buildings near parks, familiar vistas and where they themselves lived. They want them clustered "somewhere else". The hostility is understandable. London has more than 100 high buildings in its inner area and almost all are unpopular. They intrude on the Royal Parks, the Thames and Georgian and Victorian street lines, jutting up without thought of their context or surrounding rooflines, a visual crassness never committed by past generations of architects.

These towers "join" badly with their streets. Fa?ades of glass and steel are inherently hostile to pedestrians. Big buildings need servicing bays which blight neighbourhoods. The footings of Centre Point, New Zealand House, Stag Place, Euston Tower, the Barbican, the London Bridge towers, all are bleak and deserted. The Mayor's new headquarters will be a classic - sheets of glass set in a wasted park. Modern architects have lost the art of designing streets. They have forgotten how it is done.

If every tower now proposed were built, it would hardly impinge on office rents, which are anyway falling. They are indeed monuments to the ego. Planning's job is not to help a few become rich, but to help the many enjoy a habitable city. Discipline, scale and intimacy matter, especially to London.

What is shocking is that planners and architects have stopped caring about such discipline in the race for loot. Prince Charles said his comments would be "as welcome as a police raid in a brothel". His simile is apt.