Do skyscrapers beautify a city or destroy its historic value?

Mark Kirby, the general manager of the Armani Hotel in Dubai, is in no doubt as to the appeal of its location - high, high, high up in the Burj Khalifa, for now the tallest building in the world.

"It assures guests the experience of staying in a global icon, which opens to spectacular views," he says. "For residents the appeal of high-rise living is no doubt centred on the views it offers, as well as being located in the heart of the city. For us, the Burj Khalifa has been a demonstration of the can-do ability of Dubai."

Kirby is certainly not alone in taking that position - the world is seeing an unprecedented tall building boom. With some 3,552 towers more than 150 metres currently up in the world, this number is expected to double in the next decade. Look to some cities and the boom is positively frenetic: some 250 tall buildings of 20 storeys or more are currently consented or proposed across London alone.

But it's a divisive issue: one 2014 study found that 40 per cent of respondents did not agree with the statement "there are too many tall buildings in London", while 34 per cent did. Polls in Paris have showed higher antipathy: 63 per cent against, with campaign groups the likes of SOS Paris routinely demonstrating against the proposed 48-storey Tour Triangle. Sometimes such groups are successful: the city of St Petersburg's approval of a 100-storey building was recanted following widespread complaints. Those in opposition argue, simply, that to so radically change the skyline of a city - and an historic city in particular - is to destroy its very essence. "Thankfully NIMBYs are increasingly doing what they should: being NIMBYs," says Barbara Weiss, an architect and founder of Skyline, a campaign to curtail London's proposed tall building boom.

"This push towards more towers is especially a pressure, aesthetically at least, for cities of historic architecture. Yet, it's not limited to them. Every city has its own DNA and towers are part of what makes, for example, New York.

"But there are still good and bad ways of doing towers - and they're doing a lot of bad ones," she adds. "Shanghai strikes me as a monster city precisely because no thought has been given as to what people want a city to be. This tower boom is really a world-wide crisis. You're either potentially losing something precious or, at best, missing a real opportunity for positive city planning."

Indeed, just what are all these towers for anyway? According to Antony Wood, executive director of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat - effectively the global trade organisation for the developers and builders of tall buildings, and the body that moderates all the record-breaking - building upwards, rather than outwards, is the only practical response to the unstoppable global macro trend of population shift into cities. Every day, he says, some 189,000 people are urbanising - being born in or moving into cities.

"And the answer is to increase densities by building up, not ever expanding urban sprawl outwards, which would never work in the end because of the necessary energy usage," he argues. "There's no clear understanding of the ideal way of achieving densification, but, given the scale of population movement we're seeing, skyscrapers do seem the best answer [to date]. The fact is that we have to get used to the evolution of a city's tapestry, to the creation of a successful melting pot. Nobody is talking about knocking down ancient buildings to do this."

Philippe Honnorat, head of building services for WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff - one of the world's largest structural consultancy firms, operating in 40 countries and the company behind London's Shard, Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower, and New York's coming Freedom Tower - agrees that providing shelter is, in the long run, what the skyscraper mania is in essence all about. But he also offers perhaps a more immediate and nebulous reason for the rush upwards - tall buildings are statements of civic pride, cultural lighthouses whose beacons put a city front of mind for the national, and perhaps global, business agenda.