Owen Hatherley's Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain is an angry book. This makes it a thumping good read, and I found much to agree with in his critique of the physical 'regeneration' of Britain's provincial cities in the New Labour era – but also things to disagree with too. For like many polemics, it overstates its case.

It was Jane Jacobs' great books, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that first alerted me (like so many others) to the economic and social importance of the way cities are built and organized. Jacobs emphasized the central role of cities in economic growth (a contrast to many economists who until relatively recently ignored the specifics of place and time – although Bob Solow had a marvellous phrase about a city being a boom in space rather than time). She was also an anti-planner, an advocate of organic development rather than the imposition of grand visions by central planners. Hatherley doesn't cite Jacobs at all, but anyone who enjoyed her books will nevertheless enjoy his.

The book takes the form of a series of walks around a number of cities – Southampton, Sheffield, Manchester, Glasgow, Cardiff and others. Most are former industrial powerhouses whose economic base was torpedoed by the 1970s and early 80s recessions, leaving them with a legacy of long term unemployment and dereliction. Many of these saw something of a revival in their fortunes since 1997, as the economy enjoyed its long boom centred on finance and property. Hatherley has a terrific eye for both the dreariness of the dreary parts of provincial urban Britain and the unexpected architectural beauties. I also learned a lot about the shape of the architectural profession – who built what, how the top dogs operate.

He is a defender of the modernist architecture of the mid-20th century – not completely uncritically, but, contrary to the conventional wisdom, he argues that some of the constructions served their purpose well. For instance, he defends Sheffield's Park Hill estate, a lonely stance. He loathes most of the post-1997 regeneration architecture. This is partly for aesthetic reasons – patronising touches of jolly colour – but mainly because of its intrinsic link to the privatisation of public spaces and the exclusion of poor people from new developments. In short, Hatherley's anger is so fierce because he sees New Labour as betraying the people it should have been defending. The redevelopments made property developers rich through public subsidy and public-private partnerships. But they were almost all enclosed spaces for shopping and the 'cultural industries'. Housing developments such as the typical waterfront flats or inner city lofts were intended as gentrification, homes for executives and professionals.

I think Hatherley is too much of a romantic in his nostalgia for old manufacturing industries. They were dreadful jobs – many of my family worked in mills, for low pay in terrible conditions. Of course there has been a catastrophic failure to ensure people have the skills for jobs in advanced manufacturing and services instead, and we have embedded disconnection from the mainstream economy in whole communities in all these cities, but the economy of the 1970s was no longer viable. Furthermore, his anger makes him unable to see any merits in post-1997 redevelopment. Yet in the city he visits that I know well, Manchester, he underestimates the benefits for all Mancunians of the property developments and reshaping of the economy. That has been less finance and property centred than he imagines. In fact, according to a report in today's Financial Times (sub may be needed), Manchester is the only UK city outside London not to have nosedived down the international property league table. The Manchester of the early and mid 1980s was empty, dreary, riven by far more deprivation and violence than it s now. So I suspect he wears the same blinkers in other cities too – he seems to believe, for instance, that true culture (by which he means pop music!) can only emerge from true desolation.

However, there are two key arguments in the book that are spot on. The first is that the physical form of a city and its social and economic well-being interact with each other in subtle ways. City authorities can't fix the economy with an iconic new building, as so many seem to have believed. The second is that the New Labour government did indeed betray us by losing sight, in their eagerness to revitalise old cities, of the central importance of public space accessible to all. Post-crash, the buildings remain, but the public realm is in sorry need of repair.

There's an interesting interview with author Owen Hatherley in 3am Magazine.