Pacemaking the Modern City: The Urban Politics of Speed and Slowness

Abstract

Many theorists of urban modernity have suggested that modernisation accelerates the pace of life, resulting in faster and more frenetic cities. In this paper we argue that this tells only part of the story, as where there is speed there is also slowness. The mid-20th-century redevelopment of Coventry in the United Kingdom serves to illustrate this: the technocentric conceptions of timespace that became dominant in this period bequeathed a city that sped up for some, but slowed down for others. These differential mobilities indicate the speed politics underpinning the redevelopment of Coventry in the postwar era, with the city centre increasingly moving to the rhythms imposed by a bureaucratic elite. Noting these rhythms were nonetheless subject to interruptions that undermined this spatial and temporal order, we conclude that geographers must be attentive to the uneven production of both space and time to grasp fully the ambivalence of modernity.