ROTTERDAM, Netherlands—Favela, township, maquiladora, settlement, refugee camp, gated community, “cottage settlement,” gecekondu (Turkish for legally precarious houses “built overnight”), tourist village, suburban subdivision, kibbutz. “Open City: Designing Coexistence,” the fourth edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR), starts out with a sobering list of areas in contemporary cities that are, in fact, not open at all.

It also starts out demanding a grueling amount of reading. Each of these modes of urban segregation — and many more — is explicated at length in small type on A4 pages arranged over a large table. Look up, finally, and the huge, hangar-like ground floor of the Netherlands Architecture Institute — this year’s venue for the IABR — is a cacophony of bright yellow text panels, hanging neon signage, and titles spray-painted on the floor, with text everywhere.

“An Open City is the sediment of an open society,” a floor panel reads, strangely suggesting that cities must wait for legally sanctioned freedoms to drift slowly down from on high before they can find ways to be “open.” Other panels throughout the biennial, curated by Dutch architect Kees Christiaanse and open through Jan. 10, 2010, continue the evocation of this Platonic abstract, the Open City, which remains a “distant notion” due to, among other things, the pressures and fears of migration and the dominance of developers pandering to individualistic or iconic, rather than social, aspirations in architecture.

“The Open City stands for the unhindered flow of people, goods, and information, both within and beyond the city’s boundaries.” But does the biennale itself stand for this? What would that do to our sense of place? Six sections of exhibits – titled Refuge, Reciprocity, Community, Squat, and Collective; made by architects, artists, and research groups; and ostensibly aimed at the general public but difficult to digest for even a specialist audience — offer few succinct answers.

Amid the flood of ambiguous pedagogy in this crowded forum are some objects and installations: a giant cardboard globe with buildings poking jauntily from it, by the Dutch collective Stadt-Igel; Linda Roodenburg’s dinner table set for a banquet, with photos of Rotterdam’s immigrants and descriptions of their experience in the city arranged underneath the glass table top; and a conceit called Neotopia, by Manuel Pfrunder, which posits the perfectly equal distribution of the world’s resources and burdens across 6.4 billion identical islands, “an apocalypse of Justice” in which, for example, we would all have to go hungry 47 days a year.

The only thing to raise a smile is a giant Styrofoam chess set, by Madelon Vriesendorp (who is currently in the Venice Biennale), featuring a regiment of generic gray modernist blocks versus a multicolored, postmodern mercenary army of blobs, shards, and angry chiseled angles. The pieces remain in their original places; the game hasn’t even begun yet.

But in case you were about to start enjoying yourself, there are many more opportunities for interminable reading: tables artfully strewn with books, maps, and plans; a magazine rack with pamphlets on “open places” that you can photocopy and bind into your own research kit; and more computer terminals than you could possibly have the energy to use. Herein lies the problem of an architecture biennial: Torn between providing information and experience, this one, especially, can’t find a decent way of aestheticizing its expertise.

One area of the biennial is dedicated to practical architectural proposals encouraging openness in Rotterdam itself, under the heading Maakbaarheid, meaning “makeability” or “doability.” An introductory film tells the story of Rotterdam’s precisely planned, government-run reconstruction after its devastation in World War II, which led, supposedly, to stultifying homogeneity in the city’s housing and planning. The takeover of the market in recent decades is cast as equally objectionable, having merely created a “fragmented collection of visionary plans.” “Is there a way out of this cycle of promise and disappointment?” the narrator asks. Weary of ideology, both governmental and commercial, she also asks, “What is the answer?”