What are slow cities?

The Slow movement is about pausing to reflect on what is happening in your community, celebrating the things that make it unique, preserving local traditions and looking at ways to improve on them.

Three words exemplify the Slow Food ethos: good, clean and fair. Good — that food is good for you; clean — that it is grown in a clean environment without the interference of pesticides or chemicals; and fair — that those who produce the food are financially rewarded in a fair way.

Slow Cities is a relatively new concept in Australia. The international phenomenon, which grew out of the Slow Food movement that started in Italy as a protest against a proposed McDonald’s restaurant on the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986, now has more than 80,000 members in over 100 countries, including Australia.

The Cittaslow movement (pronounced chitta-slow and translated as “Slow City”) has a logo of a snail carrying a modern-day city on its back. Its members say the movement is not opposed to progress or technology; rather it is about appreciating and preserving the unique characteristics of communities and working together within them to plan for a sustainable future. The Cittaslow philosophy is a “managed system of continuous improvement”.

Slow Cities have less traffic, less noise, fewer crowds, less pollution. They aim to be litter- and graffiti-free. Members encourage diversity, support local culture and traditions, buy local produce and products, work for a more sustainable environment and encourage healthy living. A Slow City prefers local shops to homogenous shopping centres; it encourages people to talk to one another and “get back to basics”.

Towns or cities with less than 50,000 residents may apply to be called a Slow City. The Slow City manifesto, governed by the head operation in Italy, contains 55 pledges or criteria, grouped into six categories on which cities are assessed: environmental policy; infrastructure; quality of urban fabric; encouragement of local produce and products; hospitality; and community and Cittaslow awareness. To qualify to be called a Slow City and to use the snail logo, a city must be vetted and regularly checked by inspectors to make sure it is living up to the Slow City standard of conduct.

Goolwa, South Australia
Lyn Clark is the president of Australia’s first Cittaslow, the port town of Goolwa on the Murray River in South Australia. After pioneering the concept in the southern hemisphere she has assisted Katoomba, NSW, to become the second — and only other — Australian Cittaslow and is now working towards accreditation with Bright, in Victoria, which will allow Australia to create its own chapter of the movement (the criteria is three Cittaslows) and control local accreditation. Other towns seeking accreditation are Yea (Vic), Kempsey (NSW), Willunga, Kangaroo Island (SA), Albany (WA) and Bellerive (Tas), and also Matakana in New Zealand.

Lyn says that, far from being a radical concept, the Slow movement is about pausing to reflect on what is happening in your community, celebrating the things that make it unique, preserving local traditions and looking at ways to improve on them. “I think there is a re-consideration now of what is important,” she says. “People are looking at their lives differently; they are looking at what they are eating differently. Go back 5–10 years … we never thought much about it. You were a working mum, you’d race out and buy what you could, when you could, and you didn’t give much consideration to how many miles this lettuce had travelled.

“And bit by bit you didn’t realise that quality was changing, taste was changing. But, fortunately, now more people are starting to think about where their food is coming from and what processes it has gone through. The popularity of things like farmers’ markets is an indication that people are rethinking these things.”

Lyn became inspired after watching a television documentary on Slow Cities back in 2000. On the home front, Goolwa was looking for something to keep tourism alive — following the closure of its river access due to major dredging works — and the area lent itself perfectly to the criteria. One of the largest growing areas in SA, Goolwa, in the Alexandrina Shire, has a distinctive heritage with the Ngarrindjeri people, with the river trade and historic occasions, such as the Flinders–Baudin encounter. Placed at the mouth of the Murray, it hosts special events such as the SA Wooden Boat Festival and is rich in food and traditional crafts.

But Lyn says, quite aside from the physical attributes, to become a Cittaslow it is essential that you have the support of the community, businesses and council. “If any one of those three aspects is not contributing wholeheartedly it is not going to work,” she says.

As a member of the Southern Alexandrina Business Association (SABA), she was commissioned to do a feasibility study to determine the interest level in the community. Her first meeting was attended by 50 people. “That number is absolutely remarkable for a little country town,” she says. “I broke the group up into six different groups that looked at the six different categories we had to assess ourselves with. And in that process we found out, ‘Council is doing this, council is doing that’. And council found out that there were groups working in all these areas and it brought together all these little groups that had been diligently working away doing wonderful things but no one really knew about them.

“Through Cittaslow we have been able to bring all of that together and actually see ourselves as a really vibrant community doing a lot of wonderful things with a lot of good things going for it.”

Katoomba, New South Wales
In March 2007, an Italian delegation visited Goolwa to present it with a snail flag and the official title of a Cittaslow. It then proceeded to the World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains, 110km west of Sydney, to declare Katoomba Australia’s second Cittaslow. Anne Elliott was one of five founding members of Slow Food Blue Mountains and, as a natural progression, became the convener of the area’s Slow City working party.

According to Anne, with such a magnificent natural environment, diverse cafes and restaurants, artisan bakeries and businesses, vibrant arts community, classic architecture and one of the largest food co-ops in Australia, Katoomba easily satisfied the Slow City criteria. “People have a fond attachment to the Blue Mountains as a place to retreat to and escape the maddening crowds,” she says.

“It is a place of inspiration for writers over the decades and I believe we are a living laboratory. We are a region that likes to try new things and create things here before they are discovered elsewhere. We have always been good at recycling; there has always been a strong consciousness of the environment, a good mix of cultures and a great tolerance of other cultures and religions, people who want to be in a place where they can feel inspired. They want to slow down; they want to be in an area where they can walk around and speak with people — those little qualities in life that you don’t get elsewhere.”

Anne says becoming a Cittaslow helps communities to acknowledge their place in the wider world and to realise that significant changes can be made at the community and personal levels. “It is really nice to be part of an international movement because, really, these critical issues don’t have any borders and communities everywhere are facing the same problems,” she says.

“All these critical issues, like climate change and food security and food shortages, biofuels, peak oil, are careering out of control in many ways, and a Cittaslow framework gives an amazing structure to develop good communication across communities to cope with those things and to fully appreciate your community and put in place strategies to make life even better and prepare for these increasingly challenging times.

“A lot of the time, I’ve really sensed this. Huge sums of money aren’t required — it is just a bit of organisation, a bit of structuring and you can actually facilitate quite fundamental change and improvements to quality of life in communities that are quite profound.”

In an age of rising food prices, peak oil and high petrol prices, increased consumption of food and natural resources, climate change, drought and salinity, Cittaslow supporters say the warning lights are well and truly on. “There are indicators out there that show we must change, and often it requires changing at a personal level,” says Anne.