CittàSlow: Producing Slowness against the Fast Life

Abstract

CittàSlow, which means ‘slow city’, is an international network of small towns that originated in Italy less than a decade ago. Now it is proliferating in many other countries and there are more than 100 slow cities in the world. A slow city agrees to working towards a set of goals that aim to improve the quality of life of its citizens and its visitors. One of these goals is to create borders against the spread of the ‘fast life’, the philosophy and materiality of which are embodied in the ‘fast food’ restaurant chains which are fast replacing traditional restaurants in Europe and in many other part of the world. Drawing on insights from STS and material semiotics approaches, the paper tries to give an account of what CittàSlow produces and how it proliferates by looking at the outline for joining the network. It is suggested that it is a set of technologies for producing slowness. Every CittàSlow produces a version of slowness. Every slow translation is a little different and two slow cities, Orvieto and San Vincenzo, are presented to illustrate these differences. In order to work and to reproduce a new version of slowness in each new and diverse/distant locality, there is always change and adaptation to local conditions and contingencies. But this suggests that both the qualification of the slow objects, practices and spaces, and the variable procedures for joining the CittàSlow network, may be understood as fluid technologies that create mutable mobiles and perform boundaries between slow and fast.