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 Roodenburgs 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?”

As a new resident of Rotterdam, I find it baffling that these architects believe the city is in some kind of urgent urban planning crisis, desperately in need of an “answer.” To my eyes, which may not have seen enough yet, the city is a minor miracle. Sure, everything closes at 6 p.m., but its open spaces are enlivened by almost-weekly festivals of various kinds; its housing is dense, varied, intricate, and human-scaled (at least in the city center); its cultural facilities abundant. Despite alarmist articles speculating that Rotterdam could be a “ticking time bomb” triggered by high unemployment and urban alienation, the city seems to work very well compared with other modernist, master-planned cities-from-scratch.

Nevertheless, “it is time to destroy the mythology of the Architect as Visionary,” the Maakbaarheid architects proclaim, adding, “We do not believe in making Big Plans, we believe in creating Facts on the Ground. … We cannot afford to wait for the restoration of Big Government.” The most striking of their plans is Paris-based Atelier Serajis proposal for Hofbogen, an early-20th-century elevated railway soon to go out of service. They propose a kind of hyper-High Line for Rotterdam — a continuous green strip of development that would include not just a park for promenades but basically everything: a skate park, swimming pool, wind farm, farmers’ market, housing, studios, and cinema. But what’s that little image just below this huge, exciting computer drawing? It’s Continuous Monument, conceived in 1969 by the Italian dreamers Superstudio — a clear inspiration for this moderately utopian project. Seems visionary architects are necessary after all.

Upstairs, one finds another example of 21st-century closedness: artist Thomas Kilppers massive, gorgeously detailed, cartoony pencil drawing of the Italian island Lampedusa, population 4,000, which is undergoing a refugee crisis. Thirty thousand washed up here in 2008 alone, mostly from Africa, only to be detained in the island’s provisional prison; one in 10 drowned on the way. Savor Kilpper’s beautiful integration of art and political campaign: to build a Lighthouse for Lampedusa to safely guide boats from Africa to its shores. From here on out, the biennale goes into information overdrive, with endless, tendentious text asserting its supreme victory.

By the time I got to the top floor, after attempting to absorb dense installations about “urban bartering strategies in Jakarta,” São Paulo’s Paraisópolis favela, interior decorating in Russia, Palestinian refugee camps, Istanbul, utopian communities in the U.S., and much more worthy material besides, I was overwhelmed and exhausted by the imperatives of the (architectural) world, and felt the opposite of Open. Maybe the next biennale should be themed “Information City,” so the IABR can come to grips with the absurd surfeit of poorly articulated knowledge that bedevils it here.