In Praise of Slow Read online

  As the twentieth century rumbled on, planners experimented with a range of styles, notably the suburb, to combine the dynamism of city life with the slower feel of the countryside. Yet their reforms have largely failed, and urban life feels faster and more stressful than ever. The yearning to escape grows stronger every day, which is why A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle’s account of moving his family from England to an idyllic village in France, sold millions of copies worldwide after its publication in 1991 and spawned legions of imitators. Today, we are assailed by books and documentaries about urbanites who go to raise chickens in Andalusia, make ceramics in Sardinia or run a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. Demand is brisk for weekend cottages in the wilderness outside North American cities. Even the Japanese, who have long derided the countryside as anti-modern, are discovering the charms of cycling past rice paddies and hiking in the mountains. Once scorned for its slow pace of life, the country’s Okinawa region is now a magnet for city slickers eager to shift out of the fast lane.

  The cult of rural tranquility is probably most pronounced in Britain, where urbanization started early, and where fifteen hundred people now flee the cities to the countryside every week. British estate agents try to make urban areas sound more attractive by promising a “village atmosphere”—code for small shops, green spaces and walkable streets. In London, suburbs built along Garden City principles command a premium price. British newspapers are packed with teasing columns written by townies who have set up home in their own little slice of Arcadia. Some of my thirty-something friends have made the jump, swapping the metropolis for muddy wellies. While most still commute into the city for work, they spend the rest of their time living, or trying to live, like characters in an H. E. Bates novel.

  Of course, we cannot all move out of London or Tokyo or Toronto. And, when push comes to shove, most of us probably don’t really want to. We like the buzz of the big city and regard a retreat to the countryside as something for our twilight years. To some extent, we agree with what Samuel Johnson said in 1777: “ … when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Yet most of us wish urban living were a little less frenetic. Which is why Citta Slow captures the imagination, and why its ideas are catching on around the world.

  Tokyo is a shrine to speed, a humming jungle of concrete skyscrapers, neon signs and fast-food joints. At lunchtime, salarymen stand in noodle bars, gulping down large bowls of soup. The Japanese even have a proverb to sum up their admiration for speed: “To eat fast and defecate fast is an art.” Nevertheless, many Japanese are now embracing the idea that slower can be better when it comes to urban design. Leading architects are putting up buildings that explicitly set out to help people decelerate. Due for completion in 2006, the Shiodome district now taking shape in downtown Tokyo is designed to be an oasis of “Slow Life.” Leisure facilities—a theatre, a museum and restaurants—will nestle among the shining new office blocks. To encourage shoppers to dawdle, the Shiodome mall has wide halls lined with designer chairs that cry out to be sat on.

  The Slow principle is also gaining ground in the residential housing market. Most Japanese real estate developers churn out cookie-cutter homes of mediocre quality. Getting a property to market quickly is top priority. Recently, though, buyers have started to rebel against the hurry-up, off-the-rack approach. Many are now forming co-operatives that give them full control over planning, design and construction. Though the hands-on approach can add up to six months to the average building time for a new property, more Japanese now accept that patience is the price to pay for a decent home. Applications to join what some call “Slow Housing” co-operatives have surged, and even mainstream developers are starting to offer clients more choice.

  Tetsuro and Yuko Saito are a poster couple for the slower building trend. In spring 2002, the two young editors moved into the handsome four-storey apartment block built by their co-operative in Bunkyo, a well-to-do neighbourhood in central Tokyo. The building, which looks onto a Shinto shrine, took sixteen months to construct instead of the standard year. Every apartment has its own bespoke layout and style, from traditional Japanese to sci-fi futurism. The Saitos went for open-plan minimalism—all white walls, steel banisters and spotlights. The couple had plenty of time to get the details just right, including where to put the cupboards, staircase and kitchen. They were also able to install stylish hardwood flooring throughout and a miniature garden on the balcony. The final product puts most Japanese apartments to shame.

  “It was definitely worth waiting for,” says Tetsuro, smiling over a steaming mug of green tea. “When we were building it, some of the residents became impatient with the process—there was so much talking and debate—and they wanted to speed things up. But by the end everyone understood the benefits of doing it slowly.”

  In a city where many would struggle to pick their neighbours out of a lineup, the Saitos are on friendly terms with their fellow residents. And their bank balance is healthier, too: cutting out the developer saved the cooperative a fortune on building costs. The only disappointment is that as soon as the Saitos leave the building they are straight back on the turbo-treadmill that is Tokyo. “We may have built our homes slowly,” says Yuko. “But the city itself is still very fast, and it is hard to imagine that changing.”

  It is a familiar lament: big cities are fast and always will be. There is no point trying to slow them down, right? Wrong. In large cities all over the world, people are successfully applying tenets of the Slow philosophy to urban living.

  One example is the “urban time policies” that started in Italy in the 1980s and have now spread to Germany, France, the Netherlands and Finland. Such policies aim to make daily life less hectic by harmonizing operating hours in everything from schools, youth clubs and libraries to medical clinics, shops and offices. In Bra, the City Hall now opens on Saturday mornings to allow people to deal with bureaucratic procedures at a more leisurely pace. Another Italian city, Bolzano, has staggered the starting times for schools to ease the morning rush for families. To lighten the time pressure on working mothers, doctors in Hamburg now offer appointments after 7 P.M. and on Saturday morning. Another example of Slowing urban life is the war on noise. To promote peace and tranquility, a new European Union directive obliges all large cities to cut noise levels after 7 P.M. Even Madrid has launched a campaign to persuade its famously loud citizens to pipe down.

  When it comes to making cities less fast, however, campaigners have identified the almighty automobile as the chief foe. More than any other invention, the car expresses and fuels our passion for speed. A century ago, we thrilled to the record-breaking exploits of La Jamais Contente and its rivals. Today, television commercials show the latest sedans, Jeeps and even minivans zooming through dramatic landscapes, spraying dust or water in their wake. In the real world, speeding is the most common form of civil disobedience. Millions buy radar detectors so they can speed with impunity. Websites give tips on how to evade detection by the police. In the UK, pro-car militants vandalize roadside speed cameras. People who would otherwise never dream of breaking the law routinely make an exception when it comes to speeding. I know, because I do it myself.

  Speeding makes hypocrites of us all. We know that traffic accidents kill three thousand people every day—more than the number that died in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre—and cost us billions of dollars. And we know speeding is often a factor. Yet still we drive too fast. Even at the Salone del Gusto 2002, the world’s greatest gastronomic celebration of Slow, speeding was on the menu. One of the festival’s sponsors, the Italian automaker Lancia, showed off a turbo sedan that could accelerate from 0–100 km/h in 8.9 seconds. Fresh from cooing over Parmesans aged gently in mountain huts and porcini gathered by hand from forest floors, Slow Food delegates, mainly men, took turns sitting at the wheel of the car, their faces lit up with dreams of making like Michael Schumacher on the autostrada. I smiled wryly at the scene, until I remembe
red the old saying about people in glass houses. Not long before the Salone, I was caught speeding on an Italian highway. My destination that day: the four-hour Slow Food dinner at Da Casetta.

  There are many reasons—or excuses—for speeding. In a busy world, where every second counts, we drive fast to keep ahead, or just to keep up. Many modern cars are built for speed, gliding along smoothly in higher gears while labouring in lower ones. And then there is the excuse that no one ever gives to the traffic cop as he writes out a ticket: speeding down a road, weaving in and out of traffic, is actually rather fun; it gets the adrenalin pumping. “The truth is that we’re all Italians behind the wheel,” says Steven Stradling, professor of transport psychology at Edinburgh’s Napier University. “We all drive with the heart as well as the head.”

  Even when traffic travels at a reasonable clip, or comes to a complete stop, cars still dominate the urban landscape. Outside my house in London, both sides of the street are permanently lined with parked vehicles. They form a Berlin Wall that cuts people off from each other—small children are invisible from the other side of the street. With SUVs, cars and vans storming up and down, the pedestrian feels alienated. The whole scene says cars first, people second. Once, when repaving work emptied the street for a couple of days, the atmosphere transformed. People lingered on the sidewalks and fell into conversation with strangers. I met two of my neighbours for the first time that week. And mine is not a unique experience. Studies around the world show a direct correlation between cars and community: the less traffic that flows through an area, and the more slowly it flows, the more social contact among the residents.

  I do not mean to demonize cars. I drive one myself. The trouble is that driving has gained too much ascendancy over walking. For decades, urban life has been haunted by the words of Georges Pompidou, a former president of France: “We must adapt the city to the car, and not the other way round.” Finally, though, the tables are turning. By tackling the culture of speeding and reconfiguring the urban landscape to cut car use to a minimum, cities of all sizes are adapting to put people first.

  Let’s start with the war on speeding.

  Reckless driving is almost as old as the car itself. In 1896, Bridget Driscoll, a housewife from Croydon, became the first pedestrian in the world to be knocked down and killed by a motor vehicle. She stepped off a London curb straight into the path of a car travelling at 4 mph. Before long, the death toll was soaring on roads everywhere. In 1904, four years before the Model T Ford brought motoring to the masses, the British parliament imposed a 20 mph limit on public highways. The war against speeding had begun.

  Today, the push to slow traffic is stronger than ever. Governments everywhere are laying speed bumps, narrowing streets, lining roads with radar cameras, synchronizing traffic lights, cutting speed limits and launching media campaigns against fast driving. Like other fronts in the battle for Slow, the backlash against speeding is raging at the grassroots. In the British countryside, cars hurtle down narrow lanes and through picturesque hamlets, endangering the lives of cyclists, ramblers and horseback riders. Fed up with the speed demons, many villages now erect their own 30 mph speed limit signs until the authorities make it official.

  In urban areas, residents are tackling the speeding culture with a campaign of civil obedience. In 2002, a plucky American grandmother named Sherry Williams posted a sign on her front lawn in Charlotte, North Carolina. It urged drivers to sign a pledge promising “to observe the speed limit on every neighbourhood street as if it were my own, as if the people I love the most—my children, my spouse, my neighbours—live there.” Before long, hundreds of people signed up, and the local police threw their weight behind the campaign. Within months, Car Smart, a Web-based automobile dealership, took up the cause, giving Williams a national platform. Now, thousands of people across the United States have taken her “Pledge to Slow Down.”

  Another populist anti-speeding campaign sweeping the United States is the Neighbourhood Pace Program, which started in Australia. Its members pledge to drive at the speed limit, and in so doing act as “mobile speed bumps” for the traffic behind them. Similar schemes have drawn adherents across Europe.

  The battle against speeding has even broken into primetime TV. In a recent British show, motorists caught driving too fast in a school zone were given a choice between paying the fine and facing the local children. Those who chose the latter sat ashen-faced at the head of a classroom, fielding poignant questions from kids as young as six: How would you feel if you ran me over? What would you say to my parents if you killed me? The drivers were visibly shaken. One woman wept. All went away vowing never to break the speed limit again.

  Before we go any further, though, let’s shoot down one of the great driving myths: that speeding is a reliable way to save time. True, on a long journey on a traffic-free highway you will arrive earlier at your destination. But the benefit on a short trip is minimal. For example, it takes just under two-and-a-half minutes to drive two miles at 50 mph. Crank up the speed to a reckless 80 mph, and you arrive fifty-four seconds earlier, barely enough time to check your voice mail.

  On many journeys, speeding will not save any time at all. The spread of synchronized traffic signals means that drivers who flout the speed limit come up against more red lights. Weaving in and out of heavy traffic is often counterproductive, partly because lane speeds are constantly changing. Yet even knowing that speed is a false economy is unlikely to slow people down. The problem with most anti-speeding measures, from radar traps to narrowed roads, is that they rely on coercion. In other words, people slow down only because they must—to avoid damaging their car, being flashed by a roadside camera or rear-ending the vehicle in front of them. As soon as the coast is clear, they speed up again, sometimes even faster than before. The only way to win the war on speeding is to go deeper, to recast our whole relationship with speed itself. We need to want to drive more slowly.

  This brings us back to one of the central questions facing the Slow movement: How do we curb the instinct to accelerate? In driving, as in life, one way is to do less, since a busy schedule is a prime cause of speeding. Another is to learn to feel comfortable with slowness.

  To help people kick the acceleration habit, the English county of Lancashire runs a Speeders Anonymous-style program. In 2001, local police began offering a choice to anyone caught driving up to 5 mph over the limit: attend our one-day course, or pay the fine and take the points on your licence. Around a thousand people now opt to go through the Speed Awareness Program every month.

  On a grey Monday morning, on a grey industrial estate outside Preston, I join the latest eighteen recruits. Speeding is clearly a classless crime. My group ranges from stay-at-home mothers and career women to blue-collar workers and pinstriped businessmen.

  Once the participants have settled down with cups of tea and coffee, they start to compare experiences. Shame is tinged with defiance. “I wasn’t really going that fast,” sniffs a young mother. “I mean, it wasn’t like I was a danger to anyone.” A couple of people nod in sympathy. “I shouldn’t even be here,” grumbles the man on my left. “I got done late at night when there was nobody on the roads.”

  A hush falls as the teacher, a brusque northerner named Len Grimshaw, enters the room. He kicks off by asking us to list the most common reasons for speeding. We come up with the usual suspects: deadlines; running late; distractions on the road; the flow of traffic; quiet engines. “The one thing no one ever does here is blame themselves—it’s always someone or something else that makes us drive too fast,” says Grimshaw. “Well, that’s rubbish. Speeding is our fault. We choose to speed. So we can choose not to.”

  Then come the ugly statistics. A car travelling at 35 mph takes 21 feet longer to stop than when it is travelling at 30 mph. A pedestrian hit by a car doing 20 mph stands a 5% chance of dying; at 30 mph that figure jumps to 45%; at 40 mph it is 85%. Grimshaw talks a lot about the modern obsession with saving time. “We’re all in such a hurr
y nowadays that we speed in order to save a minute and a half,” he says. “Is it really worth the risk of ruining your life or someone else’s just to arrive ninety seconds earlier?”

  We spend much of the morning deconstructing photographs of standard road scenes, teasing out the visual clues that tell us to slow down. Balloons tied to a front gate? A child might run into the street from a birthday party. Muddy tracks on the road? A heavy construction vehicle could reverse blindly into our path. A roadside café? The driver in front of us might suddenly pull over for a snack. None of this is rocket science, says Grimshaw, but the faster we drive the fewer clues we pick up.

  After lunch, we head outside for some in-car training. My instructor is Joseph Comerford, a slight, bearded, rather intense man in his forties. We climb into his small Toyota Yaris. He drives first, touring the local suburbs, always within the speed limit. To a speedaholic like me, it feels like we’re crawling. When we hit an open stretch of highway, I can feel my right foot itching to slam down the gas pedal. Comerford gently accelerates to the speed limit and then holds steady. As he cruises serenely along, he delivers a running commentary on what a driver should be looking out for: sports fields, bus stops, pedestrian crossings, changes in the colour of the road paving, dips in the curb, playgrounds, shop fronts. He rattles through the list like an auctioneer. My head spins. There is so much to take in.

  Then it is my turn. My plan is to obey the speed limit, but I am surprised by how easily, how instinctively, I fail to do so. Each time the speedometer inches above the limit, Comerford tells me off. He is especially hard when I drive through a school zone 8 mph too fast. I protest that the road is clear and that it is summer vacation anyway. But my excuses have a hollow ring. I know he is right. Gradually, as the afternoon wears on, I begin to adjust. I start to keep an eye on the speedometer. I scan for the clues we were taught in the classroom, delivering my own running commentary. Eventually, my speed starts to fall without my even noticing. What I do notice is that the impatience I usually feel at the wheel has eased.