The 48-year-old Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena calls his dense, earnest and grassroots edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened Saturday to the public and will run through November, “Reporting From the Front.” The show collects work from a range of architects operating on the forward lines of what Aravena calls “battles” against inequality, crushing poverty and environmental crisis and puts it on display with the informality of a journalistic sketch.

An equally good title would be “The Borrowers.” The stars of this biennale — both in Aravena’s main exhibition and the various national pavilions that complement it — are those in debt, in many senses of that word.

They borrow money; running through this biennale is a multifaceted critique of global real-estate speculation and its effects on domestic life.

They borrow ideas from other architects, from pools of collective knowledge or from the past. And they borrow the kinds of spaces common to the sharing economy: the backseat for the Uber ride, the bedroom for the Airbnb stay.

The emphasis is very much, as biennale President Paolo Baratta points out, on the “demand” (as opposed to supply) side of the architectural equation. This biennale shines a spotlight not just on the architects who design buildings but the people who use, buy, rent, build and clean them.

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It is clearly connected to a surge of interest in history, communitarianism and vernacular architecture that helped shape recent biennales by Kazuyo Sejima (2010), David Chipperfield (2012) and Rem Koolhaas (2014). Looking back it has become clear that 2010 marked a turning point, a shift away from the often glossy or futuristic biennales of the 1990s and 2000s by directors including Kurt Forster and Aaron Betsky.

Aravena’s show has something in common with the primitivism — the interest in the primeval, the very long past — evident in recent work by the Chinese duo Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu and the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor (who are in the main show) and Aravena’s fellow Chilean Smiljan Radic (who is not).

Its critique of global markets and state surveillance, mixed with occasional post-apocalyptic scenarios, is a blend of Edward Snowden, Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein and George Miller’s 2015 version of “Mad Max.” There are echoes of the 2007 Cooper-Hewitt exhibition “Design for the Other 90%” and the 2004 Bruce Mau book and museum show “Massive Change.”

There is also noticeable overlap between Aravena’s effort and the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial last fall, which was curated by Joseph Grima and Sarah Herda and also focused on the ad hoc and the shared.

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Aravena’s main show, though full of timely and meaningful projects, doesn’t succeed terribly well strictly as an exhibition — as a sensory and visual experience on its own terms. (Over the last seven or eight biennales only Sejima’s rigorous, precisely choreographed 2010 show managed to impress in this way.) The little rectangles of text explaining each entry, hanging from small poles resting on the floor, are hard to read and then — when you are able to do so — blandly written. Some of the displays are overstuffed with projects and information, a sign that Aravena hasn’t been sufficiently ruthless in reminding the participants that the biennale entries that work best are almost always in presentation confidently stripped-down and in tone (choose one) blunt, elegiac or ironic.

In part this weakness may be explained by the quick time frame; it also seems to flow from Aravena’s generous sensibility, his interest in opening his arms wide to the architecture of the moment and featuring a range of voices usually not heard in Venice. In that sense a desire for inclusion is his Achilles’ heel.

Some architects — some architects left out of the show, that is — complained in Venice that what Aravena has produced is little more than a politically correct biennale. It’s true that the only way this exhibition is likely to give offense is in its reluctance to give offense.

Yet the tone is more tolerant and curious than strident or doctrinaire. Ultimately the PC charge is a caricature, a reflection mostly of the anxiety of a Western architectural elite realizing that its influence is waning even in Venice, the place it has long gathered every two years to toast itself.