Bluewater, which sounds like the name of an Indian brave in a John Wayne movie, is certainly cinematic: a shopping mall built in 70-mm CinemaScope. Squatting in a former north Kent quarry, this mother of all malls is a monument to our cupidity and insatiable desire for consumer goods of no consequence.

Now, as a tribute to the millennium gods for whom the British people have a unique reverence, we have declared it a "millennium product".

You might not have and nor have I. But the Design Council has; that funny old quango that, hand-in-glove with the British government, has been applying the label to machines, toys, buildings and all sorts. These offerings will be laid before the millennium gods in the mighty Dome in Greenwich. What is disturbing is that Bluewater represents everything that is contrary to enlightened thinking on the use of cars, the planning of our landscape and building design. The car-park of this

?????brobdingnagian £370 million money-spinner has a capacity of 13,000 vehicles. These pour off the already busy A2 London to Dover road. Each journey they make is a highly profitable one for Bluewater. Each may well help generate employment in hardpressed north Kent, yet each also represents a further nail in the coffin of declining British city centres, the further eradication of the high street.

Remarkably, Benoys - the architects of Bluewater - has issued a press release on the Design Council's recognition stating that "Bluewater was particularly noted for Benoys' use of materials and attention to detail in aspects such as car-parking and visitor facilities" - some mistake, surely. Odd, then, that Bluewater will be celebrated inside the Dome, which has no public car-park (although, of course, it has one for sponsors, toadies, politicians, celebs and other people in suits or media-stealing dresses). Ironic, then, that the architect of the Dome is Lord Rogers, a man who has done so much, through the Urban Task Force he chairs and through many fascinating buildings, to campaign for the revitalisation of our city centres and to encourage a reduction in the use of the car.

Yet there is a curious and uncomfortable symmetry between the politically correct Dome and the ecologically suspect Bluewater. Both are premised on the supposition that zillions of people will travel for many miles to visit them. Both are monuments to a philosophy of "bread and circuses". They are to keep the public in order, drugged on shopping and the thrills and spills of the Greenwich Big Top. Both, seen in the CinemaScope view of history, are unwittingly last-ditch attempts to deny the unpalatable truth that we are living in a world in which the giant monument - to the power of governments on the one hand and retail magnates on the other - is being undermined by the emergence of the electronic global village Marshall McLuhan heralded 35 years ago.

Yet, curiouser and curiouser, the Greenwich Dome is now attended by the latest branch of Sainsbury. The new store has been designed to echo the buildings of recent years that have pioneered low-energy technology, or that are ecologically sound because they rely on ancient precedent. When I stood in front of Sainsbury's, in Greenwich last week - I haven't been into one of these sinister buildings since before 1980 - I thought I could see hints of Future Systems' design for The Ark, a beautiful exhibition gallery for an increasingly unlikely future phase of the fledgling Earth Centre near Doncaster, and even of the grass-roofed domes designed by Imre Makovecz - much admired by the Prince of Wales - as meeting halls in rural Hungary.

Wrong or not, the Sainsbury's store at Greenwich is a handsome contemporary barn. The architects, Chetwood Associates, and the engineers, Oscar Faber, have done their grocer client proud. But Friends of the Earth have slammed this apparently ecologically responsible design. It seems to do all the right things - ozone-friendly freezer-cabinets, cooled and heated at the lowest possible cost - yet it gets one thing spectacularly wrong. It is served by an enormous car-park. Even more bizarre is the fact that inside - I sent a scout - the superstore is laid out as a kind of parody of the disappearing high street: the Greenwich Sainsbury gives its carbound customers shops within a shop under a roof that - magically - allows daylight in.

Ecological shopping and superstores, lowenergy use and shopping malls, go together like chalk and shrink-wrapped cheese. No amount of cutesy architectural detailing, no amount of exposure by the doddery old Design Council in the Rogers' Dome will make up for the environmental destruction wrought by phalanxes of cars taking families to north Kent or the north Greenwich peninsula to shop, shop and shop again. The PR guff that has surrounded both car-park-led projects has been laid on with the proverbial trowel. Bluewater has won the hearts of architectural publications by wheeling out the charming and erudite American consultant Eric Kuhne, who talks of Bluewater as a new kind of "city", a "resort". He draws attention to architectural references to great English architects, such as Sir John Soane. He has had snippets of great English poetry incised along the walls of Bluewater's endless "streets". And, boy, have the critics lapped it up.

For architects, Bluewater is exciting, a chance to work on a 12-year project that demands the exercising of innumerable professional skills. But, what if the result is ecologically indefensible? What if it cuts against the grain of serious thought that has been trying to rework our town and city centres and reduce our dependence on the car? The problem is that architects often work in a bubble. They can design buildings that are fine and even inspired within the terms of the client's brief, yet wrong-headed in every other way. A brilliant architect might design the finest ever office block; but if it was sited in the middle of the Brecon Beacons with only car-chasing Collies and sheep as potential employees, what use would it be? It seems such a waste of creative energy to see architects and their fellow professionals working on such elaborate and clever but ultimately irredeemable projects as Bluewater and the Greenwich Sainsbury's.

There is a counter argument. By 2020, the Department of Transport expects road traffic in Britain to grow somewhere between 35 and 70 per cent. Assume the latter figure. As we won't want all those extra cars cluttering up our city centres - which are destined to become cultural ghettos laced with a few favoured shopping streets ringed with belts of urban deprivation - we'll want to get them on to fast trunk roads and out to urban resorts like Bluewater. They can park happily in ever bigger ex-urban car-parks rather than doublepark in congested city streets.

According Bluewater millennium product status is an untimely official endorsement not of our love affair with the car, or with the novelty architecture of the shopping malls we continue to gawp at like children round a Christmas tree, but of our failure to see what our town and city centres might become - if only we learned to love them, for all their faults.