It just occurred to me that there is a common thread in both New Urbanism and the Indieweb. Both find that they dislike much of what their environments have become. Both seek to bring back the things that worked in the past, but update them to present realities.
New Urbanism, is dislikes much of the automobile scale commercial, residential sprawl development done since the end of World War II. Neighborhoods, commercial districts should be on a human, walkable, scale. They seek to encourage community, face-to-face human interaction and neighborliness by adapting the best of pre-automobile city design while still accommodating cars.
The Indieweb, feels the old Web was fun, entertaining, informative and educational. They dislike the over-commercialization of the Web wherein everything is simply a platform to sell you something. They also don’t like the social network silos, controlled by corporate masters, that corral most of the conversation. Therefore, they seek to go back to a time in the Web’s past when, “the Web was the social network” not the silos of Facebook and Twitter. Again, they don’t want to completely turn back the clock, but they do want to selectively bring back the good aspects of the Web’s past but brought up to date with modern scripts, coding and techniques that make it all possible now.
