In 2008, the cultural-capital baton passes from Luxembourg (and Sibiu in Romania) to Liverpool (and Stavanger in Norway). There is a lot of new building going on in Liverpool, too - but as in nearby Manchester, it's nearly all commercial-boomtime stuff. Some of this will be ready for '08, but most of it only by coincidence, and very little of it specifically dedicated to culture. The difference, of course, is that Liverpool is in the United Kingdom, where grand publicly-funded cultural gestures are regarded with intense suspicion. Post-Millennium, we prefer to leave building to private developers. We remember the Dome.

Liverpool has had a bad press on this, some of it deserved. It does not help that its artistic director for '08, Robyn Archer, suddenly and mysteriously quit on July 4. It is certainly true that the city messily abandoned the one landmark building it had planned for '08, and which helped it to win the bid against many other British cities. This was Will Alsop's "Cloud" building, also known as the "Fourth Grace" because of the way it would have stood alongside Liverpool's existing "three graces" trio of imposing waterfront buildings. (Original competition rendering shown here). There was going to be a new city museum in the Cloud, along with various other things that everyone was always very vague about. But with an eventual price tag of £324m, the development scared off the public funders. Were they wrong?

Architecture is not enough to cause cultural change. Having been to Luxembourg to see the new buildings there, I'm not so sure we should rush to poke fun at messy old Liverpool. I like a bit of urban mess, me. In the Grand Duchy, the new cultural quarter represents a very sanitised, state-centralised, top-down vision of what constitutes cultural life. It's magnificent, but to be honest it's not much fun.

Of course there is much more to the Capital of Culture year than this. In fact Luxembourg has expanded the event to a complete region - including neighbouring parts of France, Belgium and Germany. There are some promising venues, too, including former steelworks and blast furnaces. They have a very ambitious programme. This too shows up Liverpool somewhat, which is jealously keeping its event to itself. So the risk is that '08 will be seen as more than a little parochial. But Liverpool doesn't care tuppence for Luxembourg or any other cultural centre in Greater Europe. What it wants to do is exactly and only what Glasgow did in 1990 - the last time a British city was Capital of Culture. Glasgow, with its cheery "Glasgow's Miles Better" slogan, managed to reverse its bad image, and never looked back.

In Luxembourg, meanwhile, they have no bad image to reverse, beyond the one of being a slightly dull corner of Euroland. Well, have you ever stayed there? Thought not. It's not Paris, is it? As Robert Garcia, co-ordinator of the 2007 programme, told me slightly ruefully: the biggest visitor attraction, by numbers, in his tiny state is the service station on the trans-European motorway. So you can see why they might want a world-class modern art gallery and concert hall.

Pei has certainly delivered architecturally, though MUDAM contains no surprises, to anyone who knows his geometric obsession. You can spot the Louvre-ish bits, you can even find echoes of the grand summerhouse he built for private clients in Wiltshire. It is beautifully built - some of the best-detailed stone and steelwork I've ever seen. It rises from the foundations of one of Luxembourg's many ruined castles. The trouble is, it doesn't have much of a collection. The curators are desperately commissioning new art to fill it. The opening show, Eldorado, is a jumble-sale of a thing. There's the odd Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow, and the inevitable Bruce Nauman video (not his best), and a great deal of junk. I saw a much stronger display in an existing, shoestring-budget gallery in town, the Forum d'art Contemporain in the building known as the Casino Luxembourg. That will certainly be a place to head for in '07.

Just up the hill from Pei's junk-art receptacle, de Portzamparc's concert hall sits slightly self-consciously among brutal 1960s Euro-bureaucracy buildings. This is a marvellously warm concert hall with very chill foyers around it, all contained by a forest of slender white-painted steel columns. These diffuse the daylight successfully (and screen out those regrettable buildings outside), but they are rather overwhelming, even threatening, to be around: it's as if you'd just been swallowed by a giant whale.

Over on the other side of the city, two former railway roundhouses - not so very different from London's equivalent arts venue of that name - are being spruced up to house '07 events. These feel a lot less impersonal than the new cultural acropolis, and could well prove the surprise hit of the festival. So: will Liverpool have anything to match this overall mix of facilities?

Well, Liverpool has the sublime mid 19th century neo-classical palace of St. George's Hall, for instance, which has undergone a big renovation for '08. The small concert room in the complex - where Dickens once gave readings - will be a key venue. And then, down on the waterfront, the cultural programmers have to decide what to do with the vast King's Waterfront arena and conference centre, designed by Stirling prizewinners Wilkinson Eyre. They'll use it, all right - by happy chance it is due to be ready at the start of '08, and the arena can be divided up in various ways up to its maximum capacity of 10,000.

Of course, Liverpool already has a cluster of world-class museums and art galleries. The mighty Tate Gallery empire has its James Stirling/Michael Wilford-designed Tate Liverpool in the Albert Dock, and the '08 Turner Prize contemporary art bunfight will be held there: its first foray outside London.

There is only one fly in the museums ointment: part of the group, the popular Museum of Liverpool Life, closed last month. Following the Cloud debacle, there is now a new design for a new £65m Museum of Liverpool, won in competition by Danish architects 3XN. That will be the city's new icon building, at the Pier Head right in the middle of the waterfront World Heritage site. Ah, but it will not open until 2010. Whoops.

Links Luxembourg Capital of Culture 2007: www.luxembourg2007.org
Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008: www.liverpool08.com