Cities of the future and records of the past

This lunchtime I went to see an interactive exhibition entitled 'the city of the future'  by Patrick Kieller.

When I got there I was confronted by five big screens, each showing black and white films from the BFI archive, each film shot in a city (London, Liverpool, Dublin etc) between 1895 and 1905.

Kieller's reasoning for this was that the best way to appreciate how different the future might be is to look at the past and gauge how different that was.

I use a similar logic when working out retention schedules for records.  Outside of some highly regulated functions (banking, accounting, health and safety etc.)  UK legislation has little or nothing to say about how long records should be kept.  Instead of asking people to look into the  unknown future I ask them to think back to the remembered past.  I ask them whether it would matter if they had no records of that particular type of work from 5 years ago.  Who would it matter to and why?  And would it bother those people if we didn't have those records from 10 years previously?

I saw the same types of people trudging across Blackfriars bridge on the 1895 film as I did when I walked back across it on my return to work.  On the film people were walking across the bridge in strange clothes, and it was odd watching the horse drawn vehicles, some with really slow lethargic nags and others with sprightly high stepping horses.    On the way back to work some of the people on the bridge were pressing funny little metal things to their ears whilst talking.