This week’s edition of Slow Digest was written by C21 Graduate Fellow Russell Star-Lack.
To at least some degree, living in an urban environment necessitates embracing speed. City dwellers have things to do and places to go. When it takes a long time to get to those places, that pace is usually not voluntary.
The same can be said for city planning and design. Past and present, repaving a road on schedule has been valued by city leaders and residents, alike. However, this rarely happens, and it has been happening less and less. On the world stage, the US has become notorious for its behind schedule and overbudget public works projects.
Why is this the case? While there are several underlying causes, I am going to focus on one. From the 1930s through the 1960s, Robert Moses paved over New York City with freeways. In his quest to ensure speedy access across the region for local motorists, his project displaced thousands and permanently destroyed many communities, often neighborhoods of color. Inspired by Moses, city planners across the country remade their own cities in New York’s image. Like it or not, it is often a safer decision to brave a traffic jam than rely on alternative forms of transportation for the average American commuter.
Moses’ plans did not go uncontested. In 1958, an editor for Architectural Forum named Jane Jacobs published an article in Fortune criticizing Moses. Jacobs, who had covered urban renewal efforts in Philadelphia, was facing the planned redevelopment of her neighborhood of Greenwich Village, and her article helped galvanize a national movement opposing further freeway construction and urban renewal. She expanded her critique of urban planning in 1961’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, today regarded as the founding text of New Urbanism, a political and aesthetic movement aiming to plan and design the city around walkability and, most importantly, with community input.
Over the next half century, American planning processes were aligned with Jacobs’ vision, and citizens have many ways to become involved with projects with the potential to impact their communities. Unfortunately, this has not always been a positive development. While these procedures have and continue to stop projects that perpetuate slow violence, they are also used to stop affordable housing, public transportation, and anything else that some individuals in a given community personally dislike. It is often this opposition that delays public works projects, often to the point that they cease being economically viable.
So, what is the solution to this problem? How can the effect of bad actors on beneficial public works be minimized while citizen participation in planning processes is still encouraged and taken into account? Slow Urbanism may provide an answer. What often motivates both proponents and opponents of public works is a commitment to growth. Growth of property values, to be precise. City leaders hope that public works projects will lead to increasing economic activity, causing the city’s property values to rise, along with assessments. Opponents fear that constructing a light rail or multifamily apartment will cause their home’s value, most likely their largest financial asset, to plummet. Slow urbanism asks us to find alternative values around which to orient our cities such as quality of life, community, and sustainability. More well-known in the Global South than the Global North, this approach promises a way to a future where activists and policymakers-alike can focus on making cities as accessible and livable as possible in the long term, rather than fighting over who has to make sacrifices for short term growth. Perhaps one day, cities will be planned in such a way that urbanites will be able to take things a bit slower.
Meena Saini, “Slow Urbanism: Embracing Sustainable Urban Development”
This article gives a nice overview of slow urbanism and discusses a paradigm shift in urban design that prioritizes quality of life, community engagement, and environmental sustainability over rapid development and profit-driven motives. This approach challenges traditional urban planning models that often emphasize speed and efficiency, sometimes at the expense of livability.
Prem Chandavarkar, “Slow Urbanism”
The lecture in the YouTube video below, by Prem Chandavarkar (CnT Architects, Bangalore, India), was delivered at the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality (ACS) 5 Symposium: Urbanism, Spirituality and Well-Being — Exploring the Past and Present/Envisioning the Future.
Editor’s note: Chandavarkar’s exquisite prose alone makes this lecture worth a listen. Check out his opening sentences:
“Time has lost its sense of time in the cyber city. High-volume financial transactions of a scale that overshadows the physical economy of places take place within micro-seconds. Evocative images circulate across the world in literally the flash of an eye. And the speed with which one displaces another has accelerated over time to the point where the displacement has become an end in itself. A high adrenaline drop-beat to which culture dances.”
Mette Aamodt, “Slow Space, Slow Cities”
In this blog post, an architect with Multiple Sclerosis reflects on lessons she has learned about slow urbanism and slow space living in several different cities, including Paris, Fukuoka, Oslo, and New York.