In Praise of Slow

by Carl Honore

  At the end of our session, I am ready for a large slice of humble pie. Other participants seem equally chastened. “You won’t catch me speeding again after that,” says one young woman. “Too right,” mumbles another. But will it last? Like prison inmates released back into the community, we will face the same old temptations and pressures. Will we remain on the road to rehabilitation? Or will we lunge back into the fast lane?

  If Peter Holland is anything to go by, the Speed Awareness Program has a promising future. Holland is a forty-year-old BBC journalist. In the bad old days, breaking the speed limit was almost a badge of honour for him. “I always used to be the first on the scene, speeding all the way,” he recalls. “I felt I had to hurry to beat deadlines, but there was also a sort of macho kick to getting there before anybody else.” Even a collection of expensive speeding tickets failed to slow him down.

  Then the BBC asked him to file a report on the Speed Awareness Program. Holland arrived at the classroom ready to poke fun. But as the day wore on, the message began to filter through. For the first time in his life, he started to question his inner roadrunner. The turning point came during his in-car training, when he raced through a residential area without noticing a school sign. “That suddenly brought everything home to me because I have two kids of my own,” he says. “Even on the way back to the BBC office from the course, I knew my driving would never be the same again.”

  Holland filed an admiring report, and began putting what he had learned into practice. Now when he takes the wheel, safety comes first. He scans the road with the hungry eyes of a Speed Awareness instructor and has not broken the speed limit once since finishing the course. Nor has he missed a single interview or news scoop. Better still, slowing down on the road has helped him rethink the pace of the rest of his life. “Once you start asking questions about speed, that five-letter word, in the car, then you start asking the same questions about life in general: Why am I in such a hurry? What is the point of rushing just to save a minute or two?” he says. “When you’re a calmer driver, you’re calmer with your family, your work, with everything. I am a much calmer person in general now.”

  While not everyone finds the Speed Awareness Program a life-changing epiphany, the course clearly makes a difference. Follow-up studies reveal that most graduates are still actively choosing to drive within the speed limit. Councils around Britain are moving to copy the scheme. My own experience is also encouraging. Eight months after taking the course, I am less impatient at the wheel. I observe more and feel in better control of the car. Even in and around London, where the road code is survival of the fastest, driving is no longer the white-knuckle ride it used to be. My gas bills have fallen, too. Okay, I am no Peter Holland: I still drive too fast sometimes. But like many of the other graduates of the Speed Awareness Program, I am starting to mend my ways.

  When it comes to making urban areas more liveable, though, learning to obey the speed limit is just the start. As Citta Slow proved, you also have to give less space to the car. To that end, cities everywhere are pedestrianizing roads, laying bicycle lanes, cutting parking, imposing road tolls and even banning traffic outright. Every year, many European cities hold car-free days. Some even empty the streets once a week. Every Friday night, traffic is cleared from swathes of central Paris to make way for an army of inline skaters. Rome banned traffic for the whole of December 2002 from the fashionable shopping district known as Trident. In 2003, London began charging drivers £5 per day to enter the city centre during weekdays. Overall traffic is down by a fifth, turning the British capital into a much more welcoming place for cyclists and pedestrians. Other major cities are now studying the London charging scheme.

  At the same time, planners are redesigning residential neighbourhoods to put people ahead of cars. In the 1970s, the Dutch invented the Woonerf, or “living street,” a residential area with lower speed limits; reduced parking; benches and play areas; more trees, bushes and flowers; and sidewalks that are on the same level as the road. The net result is a pedestrian-friendly environment that encourages slower driving, or no driving at all. The scheme is so successful that cities all over the world are copying it.

  In traffic-blighted Britain, residents have banded together to turn more than eighty areas into Woonerf-style “Home Zones.” One of the pilot projects is a five-street enclave in Ealing, a neighbourhood in west London. As part of the scheme, the local council has laid speed bumps and has slightly raised the entrances to the area and paved them with reddish bricks. It has also made most of the streets level with the sidewalks. Cars now park in staggered clusters on one side of the road or the other, so that drivers seldom see an acceleration-inducing straightaway and the sidewalks are rarely separated by two rows of vehicles. Many of the cars are parked at an angle to the curb, which narrows the space left for driving. The net result is that the area feels more relaxed and inviting than my own, even though the Victorian houses are virtually identical. Children skateboard and play soccer on the road. Cars that do pass through travel more slowly. As it has in neighbourhoods elsewhere, the war on traffic has brought people together. Instead of politely ignoring each other, as Londoners tend to do, the residents of this corner of Ealing now throw street parties, hold rounders and softball tournaments in the nearby park and socialize in the evenings. Charmion Boyd, a mother of three, hopes the car culture is in retreat. “People have become more aware of what driving does to the way of life in an area,” she says. “A lot of us now think twice before hopping in the car.”

  Yet turning all of London into a Slow-friendly Home Zone is not an option—at least not in the short term. There are simply too many cars. The traffic that once flowed through the streets around Boyd’s home has not disappeared—it just pours through the surrounding roads. Moreover, the hop-in-the car reflex will persist in cities like London as long as public transport remains so poor.

  To wean North America off the car will be even harder. Cities in the New World are built for the automobile. Millions of North Americans live in suburbs where a long drive is the only way to get to work, school or shopping. And even when the distances are short, driving remains the default mode. In my old neighbourhood in Edmonton, Alberta, people think nothing of driving 300 yards to the convenience store. Mainstream suburban design reflects and reinforces the car-first mentality. Some streets do not even have sidewalks, and most houses have a driveway and multi-vehicle garage out front.

  Suburbia is often a lonely, transient place, where people know the neighbours’ cars better than they know the neighbours themselves. Suburban living is also unhealthy. All that driving eats time, forcing people to hurry everything else, and making it harder for them to get exercise. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2003 showed that Americans who live in the most sprawling suburbs weigh on average 6 pounds more than those living in more compact areas.

  As the demand for car-free, slower living grows, the appetite for traditional suburbs is waning. In the United States, recent census data suggest that the population flow to suburbia began to slow in the 1990s. North Americans are tired of long, stressful commutes, and many are choosing to live in rejuvenated city centres, where they can walk and cycle. A prime example is Portland, Oregon. Barred by law from expanding outwards in the 1970s, local leaders set about regenerating the downtown with pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods linked by light-rail lines. The result may be the most liveable city in the US. Instead of charging off to out-of-town malls in SUVs, locals shop and socialize on foot, creating the kind of vibrant street life that Citta Slow would be proud of. With refugees from Los Angeles pouring in, and planners across the country taking note, Portland has been dubbed an “Urban Mecca” by the Wall Street Journal.

  Portland is a sign of things to come. Across North America, urban planners are designing town centres and residential neighbourhoods that put people ahead of cars without sacrificing the creature comforts of the modern world. Many do so under the banner of New Urbanism, a movem
ent that began in the late 1980s. The archetypal New Urbanist development evokes the streetcar suburbs of the early twentieth century, which many regard as the high-water mark of American urban design. It has walkable neighbourhoods with a generous sprinkling of public spaces—squares, parks, bandstands—and a blend of mixed-income housing, schools, leisure facilities and businesses. Buildings are set close together and near the street to foster a feeling of intimacy and community. To calm traffic, and encourage walking, the streets are narrow and flanked by wide, tree-lined sidewalks. Garages are tucked out of view in lanes running behind the houses. Yet New Urbanism, like Citta Slow, is not about hiding inside a sepia-tinted vision of yesteryear. Rather, the aim is to use the best technology and design, old or new, to make urban and suburban life more relaxed and convivial—more Slow.

  New Urbanism is nudging into the mainstream. The movement’s annual conference now draws two thousand delegates from North America and beyond. At last count, more than four hundred New Urbanist projects are underway in Canada and the United States, ranging from the building of brand new neighbourhoods to the restoration of established downtown cores. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development now applies New Urbanist principles in projects across the country, and even conventional developers are snatching some of the movement’s design ideas, such as hiding garages behind homes. Markham, an affluent town north of Toronto, plans every new neighbourhood along New Urbanist lines.

  New Urbanism has its critics. Perhaps because the movement harks back to the days before the car ruled the roost, designers tend to favour traditional architecture. That often means a mix of mock Victorian, Georgian and Colonial, with lots of porches, picket fences and gabled roofs. Some scorn New Urbanism as a retreat from the real world into a twee land of make-believe—a charge that sometimes rings true. Seaside, a showpiece New Urbanist town on the Gulf coast of Florida, served as the faux neighbourhood in the movie The Truman Show. And you can’t get more unreal than that.

  Aesthetics is not the only target. Many New Urbanist developments have struggled to attract enough businesses to create a thriving commercial centre, forcing locals to work and shop elsewhere. And because public transport is often patchy, that trip into the outside world is usually made by car, via the sort of high-speed, high-stress arterial roads that are anathema to Slow living. Another problem is that many developers produce watered-down versions of New Urbanism—borrowing a few cosmetic touches while ignoring the core principles on street layout—and thus give the movement a bad name. Tom Low, an architect and town planner in Huntersville, North Carolina, thinks the time has come to reaffirm New Urbanist principles, and even augment them with a few ideas from Slow Food and Citta Slow. He proposes a new, improved movement called “Slow Urbanism.”

  New Urbanism certainly has a long way to go. Many current projects have a trial-and-error feel about them. But for anyone hoping to put “slow” and “city” in the same sentence, the movement clearly has promise. That is plain the moment I arrive in Kentlands, one of the jewels in the New Urbanist crown.

  Built in the 1990s in Gaithersburg, Maryland, Kentlands is an island of calm in a sea of suburban sprawl. Every detail on the 352-acre site is calculated to slow people down, to encourage them to walk, mingle and smell the roses. There are three lakes, plenty of mature trees, parks, playgrounds and squares with gardens and pavilions. Many of the two thousand homes—a mix of Colonial, Georgian and Federal styles—have front porches with comfortable chairs and well-tended flower pots. Cars move gingerly, even apologetically, through the narrow streets, before vanishing into garages hidden in the back lanes. The fastest thing you are likely to see here is a local fitness fanatic inline skating through the quiet roads like a bat out of hell.

  But that does not mean that Kentlands is a lifeless bedroom community. Far from it. Unlike a conventional suburb, it has a Main Street with around sixty shops and businesses to meet every need: a tailor, a grocer, a dentist, law firms, opticians, a holistic healing centre, two beauty salons, an art gallery, a post office, a pet store, a dry cleaners, a handful of real estate agents, a pottery shop and an accountant. The Market Square contains two office buildings, a wine bar, a coffee house, more than twenty restaurants, a vast organic supermarket, a health club for children and a cinema.

  With so much to do on their doorstep, the people of Kentlands have fallen in love with that very un-American activity: walking. Young mothers push prams to Main Street for a latte and a little light shopping. Children walk to school and then to soccer practice, swimming lessons and piano class. In the evening, Kentlands is abuzz, the streets thronged with people on foot, chatting with friends, heading off for a meal or a movie, or simply ambling around. It could almost be a scene from Pleasantville.

  So who are the contented citizens of Kentlands? People of all ages who want to live a little more as one does in a Slow City. The more affluent live in houses, the less so in apartments. Almost everyone is a refugee from conventional suburbia. The Callaghan family fled to Kentlands from a car-choked suburb just over a mile away. Today, Missy, Chad and their teenage son, Bryan, live in a house that would not look out of place in a Norman Rockwell painting: a large porch with generous rocking chairs; the American flag hanging from a post by the front door; a white picket fence; a front yard bursting with nandinas, burberries, hollies and laurels. In their last home, the Callaghans had to drive more than 6 miles to reach the nearest restaurant, supermarket or bookstore. In Kentlands, they can walk to Main Street in five minutes. Like everyone else here, Missy loves the slower pace. “In a normal suburb, you get into the car for everything, and that means you’re rushing all the time,” she says. “But here we walk everywhere, which makes things a lot more laidback. It also creates a strong community. We’re not the social butterflies of the neighbourhood or anything, but we know people all over Kentlands because we meet them out walking.”

  The neighbourhood is tightly knit in an old-fashioned kind of way. Parents look out for each other’s children in the streets. Crime is so low—when everyone knows everyone else, intruders stick out—that some residents even leave their doors unlocked. There is also a fine-tuned grapevine. Reggi Norton, an acupuncturist at the healing centre on Main Street, thinks Kentlands has entered a virtuous circle: slower living leads to stronger community, which in turn encourages people to relax and slow down even further. “When you have good communal bonds, people feel they belong,” she says. “And that has a calming influence on the way they live their lives.”

  How far does that influence reach? Most people in Kentlands still have to commute by car to jobs in the big bad world outside the development. Yet living Slowly at home can take the edge off the manic modern workplace. As a vice-president of safety and security with the Marriott hotel chain, Chad Callaghan puts in a fifty-hour week, plus plenty of business travel. He also spends forty minutes a day commuting by car. Back in conventional suburbia, he spent most evenings indoors, usually flopped down in front of the TV. Today, he and Missy go for a walk almost every evening. Or they sit on the front porch, reading and shooting the breeze with passersby. Kentlands is the ultimate chill-out after a hard day at the office.

  “When I come home, I can really feel the stress start to slough off, I can feel my blood pressure going down,” says Chad. “And I suppose there is some residual effect in the other direction: I go to the office in a more relaxed frame of mind. And if I’m feeling really stressed at work, I think of Kentlands, and it makes me feel good.”

  Callaghan also finds that he does some of his best thinking while strolling in the neighbourhood. “When I’m walking around here, I lose myself in thought,” he says. “If I’m having some issue at work, often I find that I solve the problem without even noticing I’m thinking about it.”

  Kentlands is not perfect. The mass exodus of commuters every day drains much of the life from the place, though a planned office park nearby may go some way towards fixing that. Several spaces for shops and businesses still lie e
mpty. And purists gripe that some of the streets could be more pedestrian-friendly. But the drawbacks are dwarfed by the benefits. Indeed, the people of Kentlands share an almost cult-like devotion to their relaxed lifestyle. Property seldom comes on the market, and when it does a local resident usually snaps it up. Even divorcing couples tend to find separate homes within the neighbourhood. Kentlands is also very popular with non-residents. Many come from conventional suburbs to walk around Main Street and the Market Square in the evenings. Some send letters begging residents to sell up so they can move in. Over the last decade, house prices have doubled in Kentlands. “The lifestyle here may not be for everyone, but the demand for homes is growing all the time,” says Chad Callaghan. “Obviously a lot of people nowadays want a place where they can live more simply, more slowly.”

  Near the end of my stay in Kentlands, something happens to confirm the view that New Urbanism, or at least a version of it, is a good thing for North America. To remind myself what a conventional suburb feels like, I set out on foot to explore one on the other side of Gaithersburg. It is a perfect day for a walk. Birds play tag across a cloudless autumn sky. A light breeze riffles through the trees. The neighbourhood is neat and affluent—and as lively as a graveyard. Every house has a garage out front, and many have a vehicle or two parked in the driveway. From time to time, someone emerges from a front door, jumps into a car and drives off. I feel like an interloper. After about twenty minutes, a police cruiser pulls up at the curb beside me. The officer in the passenger seat leans out the window and says, “Good morning, sir. Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine,” I reply. “I’m just taking a walk.”

  “A what?”

  “A walk. You know, like a stroll. I wanted to stretch my legs a little.”