by Worldchanging New York local blog editor, Emily Gertz
Few of us come to a megacity like New York to kick back and live the quiet life; this is a city of strivers. But could going slower be just as potentially worldchanging as going for it?
The imaginative people at slowlab embrace the linkages between thoughtful slowness, design and sustainability:
Fast food, media soundbytes, speedy information networks, rapid, global flows of goods and services, an over-saturated and ever-growing commercial landscape...... Daily life has become a cacophony of experiences that disable our senses, disconnect us from one another and damage the environment.But deep experience of the world-- meaningful and revealing relationships with the people, places and things we interact with-- requires many speeds of engagement, and especially the slower ones.
'Slowness' is a holistic approach to creative thinking, process and outcomes. It envisions positive human and environmental impacts of designed products, environments and systems, while constructively critiquing the processes and technologies of which they are born. It celebrates local, close-mesh networks of people and industry, it preserves and draws upon our cultural diversity, and it relies on the open sharing of ideas and information to arrive at innovative solutions to contemporary challenges.
From here, it gets even more conceptual. slowlab's upcoming projects include:
- "a more comprehensive, community-oriented portal: a place where people can become active participants in our community and contribute to a connected, dynamically evolving repository of slow ideas, people and projects."
- the launch of SLOWmail, an email service that deliberately slows down the pace of electronic messaging"
- "the New York debut of Simon Heijdens' acclaimed light installation TREE, which will evolve over time in response to the city's urban conditions."
The links between slowing down and creating a sustainable world may seem ephemeral. But there is an example of positive action via slowness: the slow food movement, which encourages people to regain connections to nature and the environment via how they select, cook and eat food. Slow food advocates organic ingredients, and the locally grown, over foods with little or no relationship to local and regional ecologies, communities and economies. As professional chefs and devoted foodies have embraced slow food philosophies over time, they've helped create a ready outlet in the cities for these foods; this demand helps smaller-scale producers stay in business, which in turn allows them to continue farming practices that enhance the land, protect the environment, and preserve the genetic diversity of farm animals and crops that have become much rarer, sometimes endangered, in the era of massive-scale industrial agriculture. These are wins for everyone who eats, fast or slow.
To change a thing -- like our city -- for the better, we first have to see it, to know it. That isn't likely to happen when we're striding along the sidewalk at the usual breakneck New York pace, ignoring most of what goes on around us while we talk on our cell phones or listen through earphones to our personal soundtracks. It's going to take a lot of imagination to get from the troubled state of the world we're in now to a better, more just, and more sustainable future. Maybe embracing slowness is one good way to get started.
slowlab's events and projects are carving out a space where we can learn to slow down enough to perceive the world around us in ways that weren't visible before, and to leap from there to imagining how it could be.
Images: details from Broken White, a slow project by Simon Heijdens
