blog.benstones.net

This is a reading response to David Parker and Paul Long’s
“‘The Mistakes of the Past’? Visual Narratives of Urban Decline and Regeneration”.

Tim Berners-Lee is credited with ‘inventing the internet’. Revolutions in the last few years have seen the rise of what is commonly coined ‘Web 2.0’ - for the guy who came up with the idea for what was essentially Web 1.0, regeneration on this scale is something almost sacrilegious and unnecessary:

“Nobody really knows what it means… If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Taken from an interview with Berners-Lee on the topic of Web 2.0, he claims that the regeneration of the original world wide web was simply just a progression in “jargon” and not in reality.

When the post-war concrete architecture that, for Parker and Long, was the original cityscape of Birmingham began to be regenerated for the new and exciting post-modern architecture of Bullring and Rotunda, they saw this as sacrilege and unnecessary regeneration. Apparent forward thinking now which will turn out to be mistakes in the future?

Berners-Lee was convinced that the Web 2.0 wave would die down, but the ideas of procumercy which lie behind the “jargon” have - in reality - stayed strong online. Were Parker and Long really right to say that the developments of Birmingham would be considered mistakes in future years? Will they eventually be seen as outdated? Well, probably. But surely that’s the whole idea of development and, in turn, regeneration - otherwise how do we progress?

“Cities, like most of the lives they enclose, rarely turn out as intended.”

Well who knew that we’d all be blogging, tweeting and interacting online when the world wide web was established? Certainly not Tim Berners-Lee, it’s safe to say.