Is Sheffield the greatest city in the world? Jeremy Till, an architecture professor from the city’s university, claims that it is — and he is quite, quite serious. That’s northern cockiness for you. True, Sheffield could claim to be one of the coolest cities in the world right now, thanks to the Arctic Monkeys, etc. But the greatest? Up there with Babylon and the Big Apple? We’ll find out this weekend when Till introduces the grimy skies of Steeltown to the limpid light of La Serenissima, as curator of Britain’s contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale, the biggest, glitziest architectural showcase in the world.

Since it began alternating with its better known art cousin in 1980, the Architecture Biennale has become the nearest the world of bricks ever gets to glamour. Venice is where you come to swot up on the latest postpostpostmodern theories, see the blobs heading for Shanghai and, more importantly, schmooze, big time.

This year, the Biennale itself is being curated by another Brit, Ricky Burdett, architectural advisor to Ken Livingstone. There was enough of a hoohah when Burdett fixed upon cities as the theme. More still when the British Council fixed upon British cities beyond the M25 for the British Pavilion. But Sheffield? Not even Manchester?

There is method in the madness. Burdett is exploring what happens when, this year, for the first time in history, 50 per cent of the world will live in cities. In developing countries the problem is excessive growth. In the West it’s the opposite — finding futures for postindustrial cities, withered like deflated balloons. As a generic postindustrial everytown, Sheffield has as good a claim as any — “more so”, Till says. “Everyone’s heard about Manchester and Glasgow, even Leeds. Who knows about Sheffield?”

Sheffield built world renown for steel and cutlery, but it’s never cut it as a city. The epitome of grim-up-northness, “a mucky picture in a golden frame”, as the local saying goes. Today it lacks that ingredient so crucial to compete in the competition that makes or breaks cities — a single image.

“But that, in turn, is its great strength,” Till argues. You’ll find Sheffield-ness not in icons and skylines, but in the fragments and incidents that turn up in songs from the Buzzcocks to the Arctic Monkeys. Till’s show, Echo City, intends to reflect that essence through impressions plucked from the streets by a band of internationally renowned homegrown talents, including the super-hip graphic designers the Designers Republic and Martyn Ware, who co-founded the Human League and Heaven 17 in the 1980s — the last time Sheffield briefly found itself not the Full-Monty-esque underdog but centre of the universe.

That’s precisely the problem set by the British Council. What happens if you’re not a world city, if you’re not the next Bilbao or Dubai or even Manchester? What if you’re a teeny bit E-list? What future do you have then as Britain’s fifth city — not first or third, but fifth — other than top billing in Crap Towns Volume 8? Echo City makes a simple point: that “cities exist despite architecture”, according to Till; that a city’s energy comes not from the bureaucrats that run them, but from the citizens that inhabit them. The point is inspired by the legend of Sheffield’s first “echo city”, a decoy metropolis built by its citizens in the Second World War to divert German bombers from the real McCoy.

It’s a simple point, says Till, but one usually forgotten by the architects, developers and city fathers constructing today’s so-called renaissance of British provincial cities. It’s the little things that matter as much as attracting blue-chip investors. The little details of life that inhabit an Arctic Monkeys song, the unerring, almost entrepreneurial, ability of Sheffield’s people to find romance in even the grungiest of streets.

Sheffield is now on its second burst of regeneration. The first fell flat — the decent Winter Gardens aside — neatly encapsulated in two recent damp squibs, the World Student Games and the National Centre for Popular Music, which closed soon after opening. Not enough oomph. There is now. For its second go, cranes lord it over the skyline, building city lofts and coffee bars to the beat of its regeneration quangos Sheffield One and Sheffield First.

Trouble is, what’s being built is unutterably bland. “They came into a city really on its knees,” says Till, “and came up with this really conservative, really safe plan.” They may have buried at last Sheffield’s image as an economic failure, he says, but ironically, the quest to put Sheffield on the world map is creating a landscape less distinctive, less Sheffieldy, slathered in steel, glass and sushi. “They’ve got to come up with a brighter future than just being the next Leeds or a second-rate Manchester.” The new architecture just ain’t cool enough for the city of the Arctic Monkeys.

()

Two years ago two of Till’s collaborators in Venice, Tom Common and Tom Hydro, began Go, an internet fanzine about Sheffield — “A Call to Arms/A Cry for Help” (www.dontgo.co.uk/fanzine.php). In splendidly lo-fi, grungy graphics and witty, excoriating prose it poked out the Sheffieldness of Sheffo (“bus drivers and butchers who call you love and duck”) while lambasting the council for throwing up bland glass boxes and “cheap Ikea identikit buildings”. (“Who needs w***y bars and Harvey Nichols?)

“The city launched its strategic plan last October,” Common says, “and it’s full of the bleeding obvious: ‘Sheffield’s amazing, a world city, we want low crime, vibrancy,’ and so on. Of course we do. They’ve just got no ideas how to do it.” Sir Robert Kerslake,the chief executive of Sheffield City Council, disagrees, of course.