Architecture is the most political of the arts in any country. In Italy, politics can seem like a capricious game, one that has deeply influenced the country's approach to architecture, design and urban planning over the past 30 or 40 years. Meanwhile, Spain changes its political spots slowly, but when it does change direction, the cultural results have been as thrilling as they have been serious. Just look at what happened in Barcelona at the time of Gaudí; and look what's happened to architecture and design since the death of Franco.  In Italy politics poisons and restricts intelligent new architectural development. The proof is that this attractive and wealthy country, with its peerless cultural legacy, has produced very little in the way of home-grown, world-class architecture in the past quarter of a century.  You might ask what on Earth do the country's 100,000 architects do with themselves? Even though the populations of the two countries are more or less the same, there are three times as many architects in Italy as there are in Britain. Many go into politics, at both local and national level. Some make it in the film industry. Some cook, some teach, while others publish alluring design magazines, or design exquisite furniture, lamps and costly gewgaws for sale in glamorous, architect-designed Milan showrooms. And, of course, there is plenty of work in the heritage business.  Because major architectural projects are so very political, these have been handed over, as if on a plate, to foreign talents, innocent of, or untainted by internecine Italian politics. So, Norman Foster gets to design a major new quarter of Milan, and Zaha Hadid has designed Rome's intriguing new Museum of Contemporary Art, currently under construction. The list of famous foreign architects is as long as the galleries of the Vatican Museum.  The one and only Italian architect who has made it big - very big - on the international stage as well as on his own home turf, is Renzo Piano. By all accounts, the charming, talented and Genoese master architect is looked on as something of a "foreigner" in Italy. Lucky him.  What great and inventive latent architectural talent there is in Italy is often channelled into a lively design industry. Next month's Milan "Triennale" promises, as ever, to be an enjoyable, and even provocative, display of playful designs by contemporary and historic talents. The list of past masters includes the work of Gio Ponti, Vico Magistretti, Alessandro Mendini, Ettorre Sottsass, Mario Bellini among that of many architects whose names we rarely associate with distinguished buildings.  The situation in Spain could hardly be more different. Politics has been a deadly serious affair here for as long as anyone can remember. Or, just plain deadly. When Generalissimo Franco died in 1975, the country began a long and steady ascent from its ignominious role as a philistine fascist dictatorship into the strong and much respected democratic monarchy that it is today. There was much for architects to do. Entire cities, despised by Franco, such as Barcelona and Bilbao, had suffered decades of neglect and under-investment, while hundreds of miles of beautiful coastline had been despoiled by trashy tourist resorts and famously unfinished concrete hotels.  From the 1980s, Barcelona became a showcase of how to revitalise a once magnificent city that had fallen on hard times. A lively new cultural scene, together with a sudden flux of superb bars, restaurants and nightclubs, was matched and mirrored by a thoroughgoing plan, led for many years by the architect Oriol Bohigas, to raise the design standards, and so lift the spirits, of the city's public plazas.  Championed by the socialist mayor, Pasqual Maragall, who held office from 1982 to 1997, and was later elected president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona became an international byword for successful "urban regeneration." And, for better or worse, Maragall and the experience of Barcelona in the 80s and 90s, are very much a part of the reason why London has an elected mayor and city assembly today.  From the late 1970s, other Spanish cities came back to life, spurred on not just by a general sense of liberation, and new-found social, religious, legal and political freedoms, but by a huge, and generally intelligent, investment in public projects, notably in architecture and urban planning. Entire cities may have been transformed, and very much for the better, and yet any number of small towns began to build distinguished modern town halls, schools, libraries, museums, often on a small-scale, but to an exceptional, and critically acclaimed, quality. Here is one country you can visit today where you will find unabashed, yet small-scale, modern buildings complementing and enhancing the look and feel of age-old regional towns.  Spanish architects, meanwhile, began to emerge on the global stage, among them the urbane Rafael Moneo, the spirited Santiago Calatrava and the outlandish Ricardo Bofill. A younger generation soon followed, with Enric Miralles and his Italian-born wife and business partner, Benedetta Tagliabue, invited to design the adventurous, costly and highly controversial Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh, and Alejandro Zaera Polo, whose London-based practice, Foreign Office Architects, founded with his Iranian-born wife, Farshid Moussavi, made their name with the superb port authority terminal at Yokohama, which opened in 2002.  Renaissances in architecture and design, occur when certain cultural and political fuses are lit; for a while these have gone out in Italy, although probably not forever. A week, as Harold Wilson once said, is a long time in politics (a very long time indeed in Italy) and anything can happen. In Spain, that fuse was lit when Franco died, and the cultural fireworks that have lit up Spanish towns and cities have yet to fall to Earth and into the mire of quixotic politics.
Spain has become a byword for home-grown architects who have transformed cities - yet Italy lags far behind. Is politics to blame, asks Jonathan Glancey