City planners tend to use the tactics of the last war to fight the battles of the next one. There is a 20-year-old letter in the Design Museum archive from a long-gone Southwark planner, explaining that if he had only had the power he would have vetoed our application to turn a banana-ripening warehouse into a museum, on the ground that it contravened his council's employment protection policies for banana warehouse men. Fortunately the council saw sense, and this week the Design Museum hosts Design Cities: 8 Moments that Changed the World, an exhibition on the planning and development of cities.

Banana warehouses are off the agenda in Southwark today, and the area is studied by envious planners the world over, hoping to emulate its strategy of culture-led urban renewal based on the success of Tate Modern.

It was on a trip to Australia that I first heard the term “temporary paradise syndrome”. To put it simply, it is the tendency for us to destroy the things that we love. It came up at one of those conferences on urban futures. When one city has what seems like a smart idea for addressing its ills then it is only a conference away from infecting all its competitors, who start building them too.

Brisbane's planners were talking to their counterparts from Seattle and Vancouver about how to deal with the way that their cities had become refuges for footloose urban populations fleeing smog, traffic, recession and blight. For a brief moment they seem to have it all: a great natural setting, cheap housing, short commutes, clean air. But of course this is only a temporary paradise. The more people who want to live there, the more that house is going to cost, the longer that commute is going to take, and the more polluted the city's air is going to become.

It's not difficult to pick out the features of a city in trouble. Multiple deprivation for its poor, high rates of infant mortality, rampant knife crime, multinational companies shedding jobs as they head for the exit, broken-down public transport.

Defining strategies that failing cities can adopt is harder. Not least because most of us have a stubborn preference for messy vitality over organised uniformity. Tokyo is huge, overcrowded and overwhelmingly ugly. But it is also exhilaratingly full of life. Brasilia is safer, healthier and less run-down than Rio. But, given the choice between them, nobody would seriously opt for Brasilia. The perfect city simply doesn't exist: it would have an underground railway as organised as Tokyo's, with a bus service as inspiring as the vaporetti of Venice. It would have a setting as beautiful as Stockholm's. It would have New York's museums and its 24-hour culture, with Berlin's cheap, high-ceilinged apartments, and Hong Kong's energy. It would have London's tolerance of utterly different ways of life, coexisting side by side. It would have the street life of Naples, and the street cleaning of Zurich.

Yet the search for a local-government version of Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People has defined urban politics for the past two decades. A new generation of mayors has treated the art of local government as if they were Premier League football managers looking for the perfect striker. One approach is to stage the Olympics. But, as the tumbleweed blowing around the stadiums of Athens demonstrates, it mostly doesn't work.

Another dependable standby has been to build an architecturally flamboyant branch of the Guggenheim Museum franchise. Ever since Bilbao, every ambitious Spanish city has become obsessed with making architectural landmarks. Valencia in particular, the birthplace of the engineer architect Santiago Calatrava, has been transfixed by this questionable phenomenon. Calatrava was invited to design a pointess pedestrian bridge, then a science museum, a planetarium, and an opera house with an uncomfortable resemblance to a dead lobster.

As the Gulf states, now locked into a museum-building binge on an even more gigantic scale, are about to discover, it's not the cities that can build museums that are the successes, it's those that are creative enough to be able to fill them.

That is one of the starting points for the Design Cities exhibition. It looks at how, at particular moments in their history, a handful of cities have shaped the culture of design worldwide. It opens with London in 1851 and the Great Exhibition, at a point when it was the world's largest city. It moves on to 1908 Vienna which created the image of the modern world - alongside Freud and Mahler, Otto Wagner was building a modern urban railway, and Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann shaped its café society. In postwar LA, Charles and Ray Eames built their famous house just as the aerospace and movie businesses really got going.

Some cities in the exhibition are tiny. Dessau for example, the home of the Bauhaus for seven years, has just 80,000 people. But it changed the nature of art and design education everywhere. Whether that would still be possible today is open to doubt. It is big cities that have become culturally dominant.

We know that a certain level of density is what makes cities work. But what we have trouble doing is persuading each other that these things are worth paying for, and that we can't afford to go on relying on the generous civic investments of the past. Successful cities are the ones that remain open to change. Unsuccessful ones are trapped in a rigid pattern that limits future possibilities.

Deyan Sudjic is director of the Design Museum. Design Cities opens at the Design Museum, London SE1, on Friday until Jan 4 www.designmuseum.org

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