There’s a story that sections of the British commentariat have liked to tell for some time, about the differences between London and Paris. The French capital, it says, is over-regulated and over-taxed, nice to look at, good for weekend mini-breaks, but stagnant, frozen, a museum piece. Its British counterpart, in this reading, is thrusting, dynamic, creative, global, open for business.

The contrast plays out on their respective skylines. Paris, after a flirtation with tall buildings that has led to two or three controversial projects scattered about the edge of its centre, last week reimposed old rules that ban buildings above 37 metres (121ft). London’s planning continues to be a free-for-all, with raucous clusters of towers sprouting not only in the City and around Canary Wharf, but also less-central locations such as Vauxhall, Tottenham and Lewisham, even in commuter towns outside the city limits, such as Woking.

It would be easy to dismiss the reintroduced height limits as another example of French municipal overreach, except that the narrative of dynamic London v sleepy Paris looks less convincing than it once did – partly thanks to Brexit – given that the French bourse has overtaken the London Stock Exchange as Europe’s leading equities market. A number of financial institutions, in relocating to Paris, have found its insistence on quality of life over growth at all costs increasingly attractive. In which case London – and other cities such as Bristol and Liverpool that to various degrees have embraced tall buildings – would do well to see what they can learn from the French example.

Backers of skyscrapers, in Paris as elsewhere, say they are exciting, modern, provide much-needed space for homes and employment, and attract business. “If vertical buildings can enrich the heart of the capital,” says Jean Nouvel, architect of the completed Duo twin tower scheme, which is one of the projects that has prompted the new restrictions, “why deprive ourselves?”

The question is whether they really do “enrich” cities. To use the word in its most literal financial sense, they create vehicles for investment that bring money, often from abroad, to their locations. But their contribution to housing needs is debatable – as they are expensive to build and their apartments tend to sell for high prices. And, as shown by the just-announced bankruptcy of Woking council, which went bust investing in skyscrapers, the returns on tall buildings can go down as well as up.

Nor are the zones created at the feet of towers convincing evidence that they enrich cities socially, spatially or culturally. If you go to the new multistorey districts in London, you’ll tend to find arid, lifeless places, lacking in specific character, their residents removed from street life by lifts and lobbies, their mood set by could-be-anywhere landscape design and by those chains that can pay the rents for their retail outlets. As for their supposed modernity, skyscrapers are like air travel: they used to be as glamorous as the jet set, but now they’re in a Ryanair phase – generic, dull and predictable, a default option for unimaginative property companies.

They’re hard to justify on environmental grounds. Tall buildings require more steel and concrete per square foot for their construction than lower ones, and once built need lifts and (usually) air conditioning. In theory, they can create population densities that sustain public transport, though in practice their residents seem quite keen on using cars. It’s hard to disagree with Émile Meunier, a councillor for the Greens in Paris, when he says that there’s “no such thing as an ecological tower”.

For smaller and historic British cities – Norwich, for example, which has toyed with the idea of height – the message of Paris is that it’s possible to just say no. For larger ones it’s more complex. In London and Manchester the skyscraper ship sailed long ago, so blanket bans don’t make much sense. Paris has long been a highly managed and centrally directed city, with a more uniform urban fabric as a result, and big British cities are more chaotic and multifarious, which also argues against single city-wide rules.

But boroughs, mayors and national government do have the powers to implement policies that limit the carbon emissions of building construction, which if seriously done would by itself reduce the number of new towers. They also – in theory, but not too often in practice – can require that, when they are permitted, tall buildings and the spaces around them are designed with quality and intelligence. Such things naturally cost money, but the principal power of tall buildings, and the main reason why they get built, is that they unleash land value, which should mean that there are the resources for doing a good job.

The London v Paris comparison can be seen as one of quantity against quality. Whereas in terms of population and GDP, London has grown more than Paris for most of this century, and created more jobs, the French capital has made much more impressive gains in productivity. More wealth is created, in other words, per citizen. Among the consequences, although Parisian homes are hardly cheap, is a less acute housing crisis.

Paris is also striving to make itself into an exceptionally sustainable big city, one more desirable than it already is, by making its public spaces and river banks as attractive as possible to pedestrians and cyclists, reducing car use, and implementing the concept of the “15-minute city”, whereby the essentials of life are close to your home. Its policy on tall buildings is part of that bigger picture. The London way – pile them high and sell them not-so-cheap – cannot, given this competition, continue to take its success for granted.