Sarah Pink and Kirsten Seale
The “future” is a contested concept – both in scholarship and in how different stakeholders invest in it as real-world situations play out. In this chapter we put the notion of future-making at the center of an analysis of how alternatives are constituted by groups of activists in contexts of crisis or external threats. We propose that by interrogating how futures are conceptualized and situated in contexts of crisis, new insights are gained into how future-oriented forms of resilience are constituted.
The concept of resilience has recently been appropriated within risk-averse anticipatory institutional logics of defense and policy and planning (Anderson 2015). Here we re-engage it to understand how local communities might live with and recover from the crisis of natural disaster or the threat of global capitalist enterprise. This advances Pink and Lewis’s earlier proposal that resilience can be beneficially engaged as a future-oriented concept, in that “as a category and objective for policy and planning, resilience needs to be re-thought . . . [with] . . . attention to its qualities as processual, as happening where different scalar realities meet and as part of the sensory and affective ways that people engage with others and with their environment” (Pink and Lewis 2014: 707). Here we take contexts of crisis or external threats as a starting point through which to investigate the mundane and celebratory ways that people make, or seek to make resilient futures. We examine how people imagine, shape, and create alternative local futures in which they can live with rather than against that which they contest.
We explore this through the example of the global Slow City movement, which advocates for and disseminates a model for locally rooted sustainable development. The Slow City movement practices “indirect activism” (Pink 2012), which we argue can generate a locally based but globally connected form of resilience. Based on our research with the movement’s Australian network, and comparable examples from earlier research with Slow Cities internationally in the United Kingdom and Spain, we compare the logics of modes of resilient, resistant and capitalist growth-based future-making through the concepts of temporalities, anticipation, and trust. We now briefly introduce these concepts through a series of binaries. This we emphasize is not intended to create “opposites” but is used as a methodological device through which to conceptualize resilience as a departure from existing dominant strands of ways of thinking about change.
Temporalities of resilience v. resistance: The temporalities of resistance and resilience work differently. While resistance can persist over long periods of time, it implies a linear temporality in that it must fail or succeed. If we take this view of resistance, we can arguably see resistance as pushing up against that which is more powerful and seeking to overcome it. Resilience in contrast challenges this narrative sequence. It creates a time-space that is ongoing and tends to be rooted in a powerfully nostalgic sense of what has “always been” and does not need to end. Rather than making a splash or a dent in what it is “against,” resilience thus winds its way around that which it is opposed to, puts down roots and becomes embedded.
Anticipation of resilience v. economic growth: Processes that generate resilience are associated with ways of anticipating narratives of crisis and future recovery and wellbeing that differ from predictive forecasts of economic growth. By interrogating the forms of anticipation that participate in how the Slow City movement anticipates future scenarios through the movement’s discourses and through their accreditation processes, we explore how anticipatory logics related to local processes exist in tension with predictive modes of capitalist growth, and potentially subvert them.
Trust as a form of resilience: The types of resilience we are concerned with involve modes of care, responsibility, volunteerism, hospitality, and sociality, and the forms of wellbeing these generate. These modes represent core Slow City principles, which are represented in its membership criteria, and are characterized by particular moralities, forms of trust and feelings of certainty and uncertainty. They are also associated with particular temporalities of future-making and anticipation. For instance, while Slow Cities are not degrowth models, they have some characteristics in common with the social elements that Kallis (this volume) argues are integral to a degrowth economy.
To undertake this analysis, we draw on our ethnographies of mundane tasks undertaken by Slow City activists, which we interpret as being directed to making the future in the present. These tasks – planning, meeting, preparing materials, translating, and documenting – produce a form of activism that celebrates the local and generates possible future ways of being and the potential for resilience. They stand in contrast to both the resistance of direct action against corporate capitalism and the growth-based model of capitalism. Thus they offer activists an alternative way through what is often the impasse of directly challenging powerful global or environmental forces. As we show, routes to making resilience are at least partially constituted through the mundane, and embedded through activities that are generative (e.g. involving incrementally compiling, contemplating, and learning) and self-defining. Their making has little of the glamour or heroism of direct action campaigns. They are, rather, concerned with building global and local frameworks through which to endorse their work; networks of trust and collaboration, and a sense of hope and wellbeing.
Below we first outline a concept of resilience and explain how it can be appropriated as a future-oriented concept, conducive to the making of collaborative processes of imagination and consolidation. In doing so we discuss how theories of the future can be mobilized to understand the making of alternatives. We then compare how Slow City futures are envisioned through activities that generate resilience. We next examine two ethnographic examples which have informed the insights discussed in this chapter, to demonstrate how these forms of future-making are played out – these are portrayed as two stories concerning how the Slow City movement translates its global criteria to be locally relevant, and the mundane processes through which cities join the Slow City movement. Finally, we outline the implications of re-working the notion of making alternative futures through a concept of resilience.
There has been a surge of research in the social sciences that is explicitly engaged with the notion of futures. This includes sociological work about hope (Castells 2012), geographies of anticipation (Anderson 2010), and the work of Adam and Groves (2007), which critically reviews how futures are constituted in culture and society. Collectively these literatures call on us to account for how corporate enterprises, activists, and neoliberal regimes go about envisaging and planning for futures.
Some existing research has systematically mapped different future-oriented logics. Adam and Groves (2007) suggest five historical and contemporary ways that the future has been conceptualized: through prophecy, which accounts for fate and destiny, and assumes that the future already exists to be “discovered and told,” but might be changed (Adam and Groves 2007: 6); through rituals, rhythms and routines – routinized actions or “knowledge practices,” which create a sense of security and certainty for the future; through capitalism and futures trading, which they suggest is a way of commodifying the future into something that “can be calculated, traded, exchanged and discounted without limit” (Adam and Groves 2007: 10); through the idea of a transformable future; and finally, through the argument that the present is the outcome of the ways that the future was imagined in the past, which gives us the responsibility (also as researchers) to be conscious of how the current present is shaping the future (Adam and Groves 2007: 14). Anderson has developed a system for understanding the anticipatory logics involved in notions of future. He argues that “an analytics of how anticipatory action functions should attend to: styles, consisting of statements that disclose and relate to the form of the future; practices, consisting of acts that make specific futures present; and logics, consisting of interventions in the here and now on the basis of futures” (Anderson 2010: 793). As Anderson shows, practices of calculating, imagining, and performing, and logics of precaution, preemption, and preparedness, differ from “social movements that may welcome, enact and live radically different futures that genuinely surprise” whereas “anticipatory action aims to ensure that no bad surprises happen” (2010: 782).
The typologies developed by Adam and Groves and Anderson offer a view that abstracts future-making through a set of already familiar sociological concepts, which are attached to particular activities, social formations, and structures already found in society. They point to the existence of different futures, or anticipatory logics of resistance, neoliberal contingency planning, and capitalist growth, and begin to explain how these are articulated and materialized as part of society and forms of governance. However, they also leave a gap: the question of how these concepts are actually mapped onto/over what is always in actuality a much more messy everyday social and experiential reality, where logics tend to get mixed up, might be inconsistent, and people’s aspirations, priorities, beliefs, and actual activities are always navigated, situated, and contingent. Here we acknowledge the utility of these mappings but we advance the question of future-making by examining how alternative futures are carved out through and in relation to ideologies, structures and forms, and through the improvisory and often meandering routes that people take through the world (Ingold 2007).
Therefore, whereas Anderson sees the anticipatory logics of social movements and the risk averse anticipatory logics of neoliberal policy agendas to be rather different, we consider how these different strands of social and political action and imagination are part of the same world, and become entangled in messy ways. The world, when researched ethnographically, is never as straightforward as it is theoretically. For instance, the concept of resilience, originally developed as an ecological concept, and often seen as a form of bouncing “back” or maintaining of a balanced ecosystem, has been appropriated for multiple future-oriented agendas across policy, development, and other institutional ambitions. As it has been articulated and mobilized across a range of agendas, resilience cannot be seen as just one thing, but as Anderson points out “resilience may not only be empirically multiple but can also be very different types of things, then we need to think again about how resilience enacts, reflects, and reproduces other ways of governing and organizing life” (2015: 62). Resilience has recently been appropriated as a concept for planning in neoliberal regimes, and correspondingly the resilience discourse has also been critically interpreted as part of the ways in which race and gender become more deeply entrenched as forms of difference through neoliberal agendas (James 2015). However as Pink and Lewis (2014) have shown, to approach the resilience as a concept through which to understand the alternative futures that Slow City activists are making means seeing resilience rather differently; it is not necessarily an objective state that can be arrived at, balanced, or maintained, but rather it needs to be seen as processual. Therefore we can understand being resilient as part of a process of weaving one’s way through the world, and thus as pertaining to alternative ways of living that are adaptive and relational rather than resistant to others (in the case discussed below through forms of humility, caring, respect, and trust).
By separating out the generation of “bottom up” forms of resilience as associated with social movements from the “top-down” ways of securing safe futures developed by frameworks like those of regulatory regimes, we can see how different logics are active in shared worlds. This unlocking of the association between neoliberalism and resilience is important since: “resiliences, rather than an ideal type ‘resilience,’ are always connecting up to a range of economic-political logics that exceed their designation as neoliberal. The multiplicity of resiliences (not to mention neoliberalisms) confounds any simple connection between resilience and neoliberalism” (Anderson 2015: 64). Thus we can situate resilience as processual, as relational to the neoliberal structures of governance with which it tends to share the same localities and bureaucratic domains in a context where “local forms of resilience may be understood as emergent from their entanglements with global and regional flows” seeing “resilience as processual, affective and as part of place” (Pink and Lewis 2014: 696). Resilience thought of as such is different from, and indeed is an alternative to, resistance. As Pink and Lewis argue “through a notion of resilience as emergent – in the making – we can re-think how forms of indirect activism become ‘active’ in the world, beyond the binaries associated with theories of resistance” (2014: 696). It involves a weaving through, and a way of living with, those things with which one might not be comfortable but that are inevitably and seemingly indestructibly present.
The Slow City (Cittaslow) movement was born in Italy in 1999 when Carlo Petrini, leader of the Slow Food movement, and a group of Italian mayors decided to apply the principles of Slow Food to infrastructure and communities in small towns. The movement’s predominant concentration of member towns remains in Italy; however, it is now firmly established as a global movement. Since its inception it has expanded to encompass in 2014 “187 cities present in 28 countries in the world” (Cittaslow 2014). Slow Food and Slow City are separate organizations, yet are inextricably linked to each other; all Slow Cities have a relationship to Slow Food groups, and local produce remains at the core of the Slow City movement’s values and accreditation criteria. Our research has focused on the development of the movement internationally, and specifically we have undertaken ethnographic and interview-based studies of Slow Cities in the UK (Pink 2012), Spain (Pink and Servon 2013), and Australia (Pink and Lewis 2014).
The Slow City movement’s requirements for excellence involve criteria set across seven categories: energy and environmental policy; infrastructure policies; quality of urban life policies; agricultural, touristic, and artisan policies; policies for hospitality, awareness, and training; social cohesion; and partnerships (Cittaslow 2014). The people who develop Slow City accreditation applications for their towns are, in our experience, mainly active, middle class, competent, and accomplished professionals. They are sometimes recent (and not so recent) retirees, and in several towns researched in the UK and Australia (although not in Spain) often incomers. While the association of the Slow movement with middle-class tastes and aspirations, which has been made by some scholars, is in this sense understandable, they are not the elitist movements that some would suggest (e.g. Tomlinson 2007). The success of Slow City leaders doubtlessly depends on their leadership, networking, and practical skills in completing a complex application and accreditation process and setting up and administering a local organization, often derived from professional trajectories in leadership roles in business and government. However, Slow City leadership groups draw on, and draw in, diverse elements of local communities, ensuring that the work of the movement is connected to socially and economically diverse groups including involvement in skill building with teenage students, with the elderly, and with alternative and regional food groups. Here we draw on the criteria and values expressed by the movement’s discourses and criteria, and examples of its work. However, we note that Slow City leaders, in terms of national politics, are not necessarily a politically and economically homogeneous group.
Finally, it is important to note that the notion of Slow, as defined by the Slow City and its sister movement, Slow Food, is not simply a reaction against a “fast world” or cultures of speed. As cultural studies scholars are increasingly accounting for, the notion of speed does not so much characterize, as Sharma has put it, “a larger temporal order” (2014: 8). Indeed, the idea that we live in a culture of speed is to a certain extent a construct of cultural studies theory, rather than something that emerges in ethnographic studies of everyday experience. As Sharma suggests: ‘Temporalities do not experience a uniform time but rather a time particular to the labor that produces them” (Sharma 2014: 8). Yet, while Sharma would understand the Slow in Slow Cities in relation to forms of speed-related temporality, the ethnographic studies undertaken by Pink and her collaborators suggest that for the leaders of Slow Cities themselves, the key concern is not a slow/fast dichotomy. Instead, concerns for them have focused around questions related to how they are already aligned to the movement’s principles for local urban environmental sustainability, economy, and sociality. Therefore, in order to understand how the movement is actually engaged with local temporalities, we need to look beyond an analysis of its discourses, to instead ask how it is actually manifested in the processual and material realities of member towns. Thus our interest in temporality is in how past-present-future become entangled in defining Slow and its alterities, rather than in speed.
The Slow City movement has recently become implicated in town-based narratives about recovery from crisis, which reveal how the movement expounds alternative routes to recovery from crisis that evade both resistance and growth models, and suggest how Slow City membership may generate forms of resilience. The Australian network of the movement, with whom we undertook research, offers an ideal example. Crisis and recovery were at the center of Slow City leaders’ narratives in their discussions with us and in their more formal engagements with the movement and other members. For example, Adele Anderson, who was in 2013 Vice-President of Cittaslow Australia (CSA), explicitly positioned her town Yea’s bid for Slow City status as an attempt to rebuild the town after it was physically and psychologically devastated after deadly bushfires in 2009. In 2013, Katoomba, Blue Mountains, another member town, suffered serious bushfire damage, while the CSA Annual conference was taking place in the town of Goolwa, and Adele suggested the network could act as a support to Katoomba in the aftermath of bushfires. These narratives of crisis, trauma, and recovery were told around a range of issues. Goolwa itself had also undergone collective emotional and economic hardship as a consequence of years of drought and national and state water management policies that drained its Murray River system and decimated local tourism and fishing industries. Margaret Gardner (member of Alexandrina Council and member of Cittaslow Goolwa) described the town as “depressed” during the drought. Goolwa was, moreover, recovering from the effects of The Hindmarsh Affair – a dispute relating to Indigenous beliefs and property rights – which caused deep, ongoing social and political divisions in the town (Simons 2003). While the CSA made no official statement about the process of becoming a Slow City as a means of recovery from crisis, many within the organization perceive it as a coping strategy.
These narratives, as they were recounted to us during our fieldwork, situated recovery as embodied, sensory affective, and processual. That recovery also needed to have an economic element was also acknowledged, particularly in Goolwa. However, the approach to recovery manifested here is explicitly interwoven with a therapeutic narrative that goes beyond economic growth as recovery to focus on social, psychological, sensory, and embodied notions of wellbeing.
Australia is a predominantly urban country in terms of its population distribution (Australian Government 2015), most of which is concentrated along the east coast. Most urban research in Australia has been undertaken in and on its cities, leaving towns under-examined (Henry 2012). However, towns are increasingly popular with an influx of retirees and in some areas urban food and creative cultures have accompanied this, making towns increasingly interesting places to settle for people with families, including, according to our participants, returnees from larger metropolitan centers.
During our research, there were three accredited Slow Cities in Australia: Goolwa in South Australia, Katoomba in New South Wales, and Yea in Victoria. Goolwa is 1,300 km from Katoomba and 800 km from Yea. The network is geographically diffuse and the towns are at least two hours travel from metropolitan centers. Our research involved short-stay visits and drives out for meetings, events, and interviews in towns nearer to the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne. Our fieldwork methods were adapted to suit each local context and the time we could spend with participants, as well as the activities they were involved in and stages of their application and implementation processes. Earlier research included following a group preparing an application (Pink and Lewis 2014). We have also analyzed the Slow City documentation and process, including self-assessment documents and textual and video documentation of accreditation applications, and attended meetings and workshops organized by individual Slow City groups and CSA.
Slow City documents, documentation, accreditation, and translation sit precisely within, and are part of the encounter between the town leaders and the global movement. They are thus material and sensory actualizations of those moments where past-present-future temporalities are brought together as town leaders discussed, defined, remembered, imagined, and planned for their towns. It is to these processes that we turn in the next section.
The making of a Slow City, as was echoed in conversations with participants across Australia, UK, and Spain, cannot be manufactured for the application process. Town leaders consistently felt that their towns were already Slow Cities, and that the purpose of the accreditation process was to put this into a format that made it recognizable for the movement and, importantly, acknowledged this status and identity on a global stage. Pink and Lewis have suggested that in creating Slow City identities for their towns and areas, the Slow City leaders “delved into their biographical memories of a ‘sense of place,’ and imagined a future . . . It is by bringing these historical, environmental and cultural dimensions into a narrative about what they ‘already are’ that the present becomes invested in a future, framed by the movement” (Pink and Lewis 2014: 704). Indeed, the process of becoming a Slow City significantly balances between the local and the global and the past and the future. It makes possible a route into the future that is endorsed and facilitated through a globally acknowledged framework. Therefore, possibilities are imagined through the process of becoming a Slow City. The process does not make futures in any objective sense, but opens up ways of imagining futures and creating routes toward them.
Despite the lengthy and extensive collation of information and preparation of documentation involved in fulfilling the self-evaluation required for Slow City membership, many participants recalled this as a positive, useful, and collaborative process. Discussion at the CSA meeting in Goolwa on this topic, at which there were representatives from all Australian Slow Cities, centered on how to make the process relevant to the Australian context, and by extension, more accessible to prospective new member towns. For example, Adam from the Yea contingent observed that the accreditation process was a reminder of what they valued about their town, and of quantifying that in a productive, concrete way. Our interviews and conversations with participants showed how the accreditation process was not merely an intermediary step toward an imagined future. Slow City membership is rather an “enabling technology” (Pink and Lewis 2014) that is not activated merely at the point of achieving member status (or accreditation). Rather, the process of achieving membership itself is enabling. For our participants the inventory and evaluation mobilized during the accreditation application was critical in making the future of their towns; it enabled them to generate ways of knowing (about) and representing their towns and implicitly informed further action and thinking. The documents generated are not just bureaucratic “paperwork” but affective texts. Since 2005 we have been presented with or shown copies of application materials across several UK and Australian Slow Cities, and have been told the stories of application in most towns visited. The application process is thorough and can last one or two years. For example, for one UK town where the town leaders passionately felt their town fitted the movement but did not meet one of the criteria, this meant a long “battle” to become accredited.
The accreditation documents consisted of six areas and 60 or so criteria. They are often presented in tabular form, although one group of town leaders presented their application as a series of video-recorded discussions sitting around a table with a glass of wine and structured around the same themes and criteria. They felt this was in the spirit of the movement and of what they wanted to convey. These videos offered the group who accredited their membership of the movement, and us as researchers, ways to appreciate the feelings of belonging to the movement. The thematic frameworks that shape the applications ask the Slow City applicants to respond to a series of questions that are future oriented. Often these specifically ask the application committees to present their “plans for” securing particular objectives, thus requesting applicants to lay out their plans for making possible certain futures and seeking to avert others. For example, in Katoomba, Blue Mountains, which was one of the first towns to be accredited in Australia and had gone through the full international accreditation process which had included a visit from the movement’s leaders based in Italy, Sue talked through the application process. When Sarah asked Sue how she thought Cittaslow would help she explained:
because I wanted to reframe what we have here, that I saw as so valuable in terms of . . . landscape, heritage and built heritage, and I wanted to frame it in a way that . . . its value would be more easily recognized by others, because . . . some really quite highly educated people were fond of saying things like “oh you should just bulldoze it and start all over again,” and it seemed to me that was really a tragedy.
For Sue these tragedies are part of a possible future, but by seeking ways to avert them, Cittaslow became a way to imagine another possible future. To put this into a more experiential context, when Sue and her partner Nigel walked Sarah and Tania around the town, as described elsewhere, Nigel accounted for its architecture not in its present manifestation but, for example, by taking us into a bargain store and showing us where the historical stage and gallery seating of a theatre was boarded over to make a commercial setting (Pink and Lewis 2014), invoking a hidden past and hope for its recovery in the future. Therefore, Cittaslow is not a predictive technology; it does not follow the logics of “prevention” of regulatory frameworks or forms of contingency management, and does not pretend to make the future knowable. Rather, it aligns with and supports ways to imagine the future as a series of possibilities in a context of uncertainties.
This non-linear temporality that characterizes how Cittaslow accreditation enables people to imagine futures in relation to past and present is manifested in multiple ways. For instance, in the Katoomba, Blue Mountains accreditation document, in a section about crime, past, present, and future are drawn together to represent a place in forward movement, and in a process where interventions are consistently being made toward a “better” future. For example:
The Katoomba Chamber of Commerce and Community has organized for graffiti cleaning kits to be distributed to shopkeepers who require them and promote a zero tolerance of vandalism and graffiti in the area, encouraging prompt reporting and removal of graffiti. CCTV cameras will be put in place in Katoomba Street in 2007.
Such Slow City application materials cluster mundane local activities, policies, issues, and materialities into a single document. In calling these mundane, we do not suggest they are devoid of meaning; rather, we emphasize how they are the ongoing but hidden things and infrastructures that underpin it. In fact they are drenched with meaning, as they hold up what is seen, felt, and sensed. The accreditation documents thus relate to the present and to how the infrastructures they reveal will “hold up” the towns as they move into futures. They enable the applicants to engage with the future as something that is felt and imagined in a more corporeal or visceral way, as well as represented verbally. We might therefore see these apparently mundane accreditation documents as providing a scaffold for how people imagine their towns developing into the future.
Finally, accreditation is also a moment of trust; it is based on self-reporting, and usually on a guided visit from a more established set of Slow City leaders. Not all towns are accredited, or at least not immediately, and the movement has been particularly wary and vigilant of towns applying for Slow City status for tourism branding; it is precisely mass commercial tourism that the movement, and the leaders in its member towns, seek to discourage (Pink and Servon 2013). There is also an element of quantification, in that the towns are asked to score themselves against the criteria in a self-assessment against which they need to score 50 percent. Yet this is a subjective form of quantification, which is self-assessed and likewise is based on a form of morality and trust. Once accredited, towns are expected to improve on their scores, as part of a forward moving process, and they continue to be monitored through the submission of periodic self-assessment documents.
The temporalities of Slow City accreditation bring together the past with the present as it slips over into the immediate future, and the more distant aspirational, hoped for future. It is concerned with forms of safeguarding the positive elements of the past and present, and planning for a future that meets the movement’s criteria for environmental sustainability, hospitality and sociality, heritage, and more. The futures mapped in such documents are rooted in the present-past; they are nostalgic, but at the same time practically oriented to documentable and experienced realities, yet they are also aspirational and anticipatory. Because they are often created to deal with perceived, actual, and experienced crises, they are additionally ways of creating forms of resilience against other possible anticipated or imagined futures. They offer frameworks for coping with uncertainty, which are embedded in what can be known about the present, and that call on the more-than-local context of the global Slow City movement for their endorsement. They form part of what can be experienced as a collectively imagined future. In the next section, we explore how the local-global elements of the movement are co-implicated in this process.
The geographic and political anomalies and particularities of the Australian context, as well as Australia’s distance from the governing body of the Slow City movement in Orvieto, Italy, has meant that Cittaslow International has devolved responsibility for local accreditation within Australia to Cittaslow Australasia (CSA). This follows their standard approach to giving national networks a certain degree of autonomy to adapt the movement’s criteria to local circumstances. The creation of the CSA coheres with the Slow City movement’s objectives in that “By reducing travel we reduce our ecological footprint and this is one of the aims of a Cittaslow” and also enables “the establishment of the Australian criteria based on the original Italian goals” (http://www.cittaslow.org.au/page.asp?id=39).
Efforts to translate criteria are future-oriented for the network itself as well as for the towns. At the 2013 meeting in Goolwa it was advanced that Australian Slow Cities should adopt regional identities by calling themselves Yea-Murrindindi, Katoomba-Blue Mountains, Goolwa-Alexandrina, therefore removing the focus from a single town. This is significant to the future sustainability of the network given that, unlike the Italian model, local government is not exclusive to a town. Because the survival of Slow Cities (whether or not they are actual towns or conglomerations of settlements) is dependent on their alignment with and the political turns of local and regional government, they need to engage existing local governance entities with them and their principles.
The complex and diverse responses to globalization amongst the movement’s members often exhibited a pragmatic nostalgia. By this we mean a future-oriented acknowledgement of what one wants to “protect,” or what one values, individually and/or collectively, about one’s town that is informed equally by conservatism and an awareness of, and motivation to address the challenges of the present. An example of this can be seen in how the work of the Slow City movement is entangled with the flows of corporate and other national and global interests. Anne Elliott framed her introduction to Slow philosophy in terms of the fight against fast food chains in the Blue Mountains. She was comfortable with being called an activist. However, when Sarah and Tania were discussing Cittaslow with Sue and Nigel Bell in Katoomba, Blue Mountains, Sue emphasized how there is often no possibility of resisting certain developments that are not consistent with Cittaslow ideals. As she put it, “the development gets approved, it’s past the point of no return, you know it’s going to go ahead and the last thing you want to see is another empty shop site in your town so you know you’ve got to really make it work.” Likewise, as Pink has shown elsewhere in the UK, town leaders found that given local planning approvals they were unable to prevent the building of large supermarkets in or just outside of their towns. Although they spoke quite bitterly about these developments, they also had to work with, rather than against, them (Pink 2009). As Sue said later in our discussion, Cittaslow is “a global movement . . . so hopefully it could . . . be a balance to the corporate global . . . [a] counterbalance, yes.” In a sense, this notion of a counterbalance represents a realistic view of what Slow City leaders can hope for.
Indeed while, as we have shown, the movement offers ways for town leaders to imagine alternative futures to those they fear, there is a deal of ambivalence around the idea of activism amongst some local leaders of the movement. Although the Italian-based movement has emerged from left-wing politics in that national context, the local leaders of Slow Cities internationally are not necessarily committed to the same party politics and represent diverse groups in that sense. Likewise, they have a broad range of opinions about activism, and members of the network occupy different positions along the spectrum of activism. The subject of activism (or being “negative” as it was described by someone) in Australia was folded into a larger conversation about the identity of Slow Cities in the CSA network, and whether activism was something that was Slow City in and of itself. For instance, at a workshop at the 2013 meeting, it was suggested that CSA should not take an anti-, or negative stance in their advocacy such as being “anti-[fast food chain],” even though, as Lidia Moretti (Adelaide Slow Food) pointed out, the very origins of Slow Food (and consequently Slow City) were conceived through a protest against fast food. “We are not a transition town,” another participant said. The group shared the view that if a fast food burger restaurant wanted to come to an Australian Slow City, they should not adopt a mandatory policy of opposition. Instead, they agreed that a Slow City should be able to dictate the terms on which they came to the town.
This conversation referred to Dandenong/Tecoma’s fight against a fast food outlet (Pink and Lewis 2014), which some were concerned was not broad enough in its focus to really count as an activity of a Slow City. The discussion covered how, when a CSA contingent visited one town which had expressed interest in accreditation, it was clear that their objective in becoming so was solely to block a supermarket development. However, it was also suggested that groups who represented towns who were campaigning against development should not be discounted for this reason, but rather should be assisted in taking a more comprehensive view of why their town should become a Slow City. This was related to a more general motivation to “mentor” towns interested in joining the CSA network, and thus forming part of the processes and objectives of translation that were designed to encourage membership.
This national level debate is illustrative in that it situates the Australian Slow City network, not as a campaigning organization to directly resist capitalist growth, but rather as an organization that wishes to create environments in which the movement’s criteria are represented and mobilized toward environmentally sustainable futures. This does not mean that the movement necessarily supports capitalist growth – internationally, nationally, or locally. Instead, it provides a realistic view of what the movement can actually achieve in terms of the political and economic power it wields and the objectives of its framework. Such an approach will not produce or support the degrowth agenda of political, social, and economic reform that is proposed in Kallis’s chapter (this volume) in a substantial or dramatic way, but rather makes its impact on a local scale. However, its form of indirect activism can impact how businesses are able to trade in local environments. For instance, in the Katoomba, Blue Mountains area, certain large companies could not even set up due to local planning laws. In the UK examples, local Slow City leaders encouraged local people and organizations to use local services and businesses, which conformed to Slow City criteria, to shop at cooperatives and farmers’ markets, and embedded these values and the activities and economies associated with them through local festive and ritual cycles. This produces forms of resilience; it is about coping now, in a way that is oriented toward a future which remains resilient because it can avert unwanted futures through the active practice and experience of the Slow City principles.
As such, the Slow City movement offers an alternative to models of capitalist growth, and embodies these by inviting people to actually live them out, thus keeping them alive, in the present and into the future. Yet it is also an alternative to direct resistance, which in the case of many of the things that the movements’ members are opposing – such as the loss of local heritage architecture in high streets, the growth of supermarket chains, and the emergence of global fast food outlets – has often not been successful. Therefore, the Slow City movement, in its various manifestations around the world, can be seen as having a particular role, and one that indeed can encompass a range of diverse and potentially opposed party political agendas because it is about forming resilience rather than resistance.
The future-oriented mode of resilience cannot resolve what movements like Slow Cities see as the ills of the world, stop the pursuit of capitalist models of growth, or replace the intensity of the pain and hope of direct resistance. Yet it offers a framework through which to achieve forms of everyday and anticipatory wellbeing that are of benefit in times of crisis, and to anticipate futures that will feel better than those which are feared or which are threatening the communities involved.
The Slow City approach to making alternative futures to those that might be imagined through models of capitalist growth shows how an approach that engages with tangible possibilities, rather than more abstract and holistic solutions, can offer some respite – if not complete resolution in the face of threat or crisis. As argued elsewhere (Pink and Servon 2013; Pink and Lewis 2014), the Slow movement does not make alternative temporalities (e.g. as argued by Parkins and Craig 2006) and is not so much a corrective to “slowing” the fastness of modernity. Rather it seeks to make alternative ways of being and experiencing, which have an inevitably future orientation. These alternatives acknowledge the difficulty of achieving holistic solutions and instead create routes to futures that are inevitably partial and therefore can be understood only as relational to what “else” is there.
The future, like the present, will be mundane, messy and complicated. Any clear vision of it will be hijacked by the contingencies and the conditions created by “what else” is there. If we see the future as entangled, then approaches like that of the Slow City movement become threads, which through their relationships to other, perhaps as yet unknown threads, seek to constitute futures that are sustainable and fair.
The research discussed in this chapter was undertaken by Sarah Pink and Kirsten Seale and supported by the Design Research Institute and School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. We thank Tania Lewis at RMIT who contributed to an earlier stage of the research. Our biggest thanks go to the Slow City leaders who generously participated in the research.