Last month Birmingham City Council published its Snow Hill Masterplan.

This is an ambitious plan to transform a large part of the city centre, stretching from the Council House to Lancaster Circus, which includes Snow Hill station, Victoria Law Courts and the Children's Hospital.

A major part of the plan is to extend the central business district with a number of new office buildings around the railway station.

This caused both journalists and politicians to label it as Birmingham's Canary Wharf. The comparison is crass and misguided on two levels.

First, Birmingham's frequently-repeated aspiration to be like London, or better, is a sad reaction to its long in-built sense of inferiority.

It compares itself to the capital, a pointless exercise which is bound to fail. It would be better to learn from other provincial cities overseas with progressive ideas.

Secondly, it is a comparison made with the wrong part of London. Councillor John Clancy wrote a very strongly worded riposte in this newspaper, asking why on Earth Birmingham wished to emulate a district which is the location of the financial incompetence, greed and arrogance which caused the current economic recession.

One can make a similar objection from an urban design perspective. Why, in the historic centre of Birmingham, should we want to emulate a jumped-up, opportunistic piece of out-of-town development built on disused dockland?

The quality of its environment, over-scaled and overbearing, lacking in urban character, is not one which a city centre should want to copy.

If we were wanting to build Birmingham in the image of London, which is a futile goal anyway, a much more appropriate place to choose would be the new and emerging King's Cross, a much more intelligently planned and responsive urban environment.

Better still would be to examine what is good about the Victorian and Edwardian townscape of the adjacent Colmore Estate between Colmore Row and St Paul's Square, a grid-iron of characterful, midrise buildings, with a mixture of economic uses: and then produce a 21st century counterpart to that historic conservation area.

There are bold proposals in the masterplan for remodelling Snow Hill station: demolishing part of the multi-storey car park that squats above the station, creating a new concourse, bringing daylight down to the platforms, and adding new buildings and facilities.

This is a classic example of Birmingham hoping to get it right the second time around, just as it is doing with New Street Station and the Inner Ring Road.

After the Victorian Snow Hill station and Great Western Hotel were demolished in the 1970s, no comprehensive plan was made for the station's redevelopment.

Instead, pragmatic approvals were given for office blocks to be built at the more valuable Colmore Row end, with no thought given to how these would prevent any further development on the rest of the site.

A basement railway station of reduced size was built underneath a multi-storey car park, which created a squalid and inhospitable environment at platform level, with an illegible entrance into the station from Colmore Row.

Just as at New Street station in the 1960s, the rebuilding of Snow Hill station in the 1980s, shaped by shortsighted commercial imperatives, lost all the grandeur and sense of the importance of the public realm that had been achieved by the railway companies in the 19th century. Better to get it right the second time around than not at all.

But to succeed, it will require a consistent prioritisation of public space and utility over private business interests. The masterplan has the increase of high quality office space as a major target, and proposes a massive additional 2.1 million sq ft be built.

The development of Grade A office space is not enough by itself to ensure that a distinctive, legible and enjoyable urban townscape results. The present Snow Hill station is an object lesson in this respect.

However, the provision of grade A offices is of course not incompatible with the production of a high-quality public realm.

Many fine 19th century cities were created by the growth of business and industry. King's Cross and Brindleyplace are modern examples of how excellent working conditions and an excellent public realm can be mutually supportive.

The masterplan document is very oriented towards promoting business interests: it is after all produced by the city council in partnership with the Colmore Business Improvement District.

The writing occasionally descends to ghastly business-speak: it refers at one point to the "heritage offer" of the area. Another section specifies "a world–class visitor and user experience". Could anyone define what that is?

The masterplan aims to continue the correction of another major mistake of the 20th century, the severing of the city centre by the Inner Ring Road – in this case by Great Charles Street Queensway. It proposes the downgrading of the Queensway (I would call it an upgrading myself), turning Great Charles Street from a dual-carriageway highway into a tree-lined boulevard.

At the northern extremity of the masterplan area, the complete redesign of Lancaster Circus is proposed, including the removal of the A38 flyover.

All this revisionism is admirable, and very welcome. But it raises an intriguing question. Would Birmingham have such ambition today for upgrading its quality had it not made such disastrous mistakes with its planning in the 1950s and 60s?

The Herbert Manzoni period of municipal planning (1935-63) and the post-Manzoni period produced the severance of the Inner Ring Road, the domination of urban space by the motor car, indiscriminate comprehensive redevelopment which destroyed whole districts, the multiplication of mass-produced blocks of council flats, and disregard for historic architecture.

These mistakes the city council is now energetically trying to correct (with some exceptions).

But maybe it was necessary and inevitable that this wrongheaded period had to happen, as part of a great dialectical historical process, in order for us to get to where we are now.

But let's not feel too superior, until we see that we really have succeeded in getting it right the second time around.

Joe Holyoak is an architect and urban designer based in Birmingham