Speed, Slowness, and Values.

Speed is typically thought of as a measurement – unit of distance per unit of time. But speed is so much more than that. Its numerical measurement belies the complicated meanings that speed is given, often in quite banal ways. Public data on road traffic, for instance, is often used in the UK as an indicator of the state of the economy. More road traffic, it is argued, means more economic activity and suggests that the economy is in a healthy state – an equation that ascribes the meaning of economic success to high levels of speed and automobility. Mobility equals productivity. The Data Science Campus of the Office of National Statistics used road traffic statistics, collected from induction loops and radar sensors across the country’s major roads.^[i] These make both traffic counts and average speed data available. In “normal” times, fast and frequent traffic is considered to be a good thing – a proxy for a booming economy. During the COVID lockdowns the positive evaluation of fast and frequent (auto)mobility was dramatically reversed and the same induction loops and radar sensors were used to measure the effectiveness of the lockdowns. High numbers suddenly became negatively coded – evidence that people were not ‘staying home and saving lives’. The same measurements became proxies for pathological behaviour and the danger of contagion. Like other facets of mobility, what seems like a simple form of measurement becomes freighted with meaning in often quite political ways.

UK road traffic statistics are not the only way speed has been equated with a successful economy. There is now a considerable body of work that reveals how the individual pace of walking increases with more successful economies and larger cities. Researchers argue that the speed of walking is related the perceived value of time in relation to wage rates and the cost of living.^[ii]  In 1976, Bornstein and Bornstein timed pedestrians as they covered 50 feet in 15 cities in 6 countries and concluded that pedestrian speed is a log linear function of city size.^[iii] Using a more sophisticated set of measurements, Walmsley and Lewis confirmed this general observation in 1989, noting four possible reasons including the need to walk longer distances in bigger places, the need to avoid social contact in bigger cities, and the increased value of pedestrian time in economically more vibrant areas.^[iv] Still more recently, in 1999, Levine and Norenzayan surveyed the “pace of life in 31 countries” arguing that the size of cities alone was unlikely to be the cause of faster walking pace. The 1999 study drastically expanded the number of sites investigated and increased the range of locations across the globe to account for cultural differences in walking pace. Rather than sampling a range of city sizes they focused on the biggest cities in their respective countries. They started with six hypotheses in addition to the already familiar hypothesis that bigger cities will have a higher pace of life. These included a projected link between higher pace of life and better subjective wellbeing, a suspicion that hotter climate would be correlated with slower speeds, and that people would smoke more in faster places. The first hypothesis, however, was “the more vital a city’s economy, the faster its pace of life.”^[v] Economic vitality was measured using a combination of GDP, the amount people could purchase on their income (purchasing power parity (PPP)), and the average calorific intake. They concluded that economic vitality was the strongest predictor of pace of life.

Faster paced places will tend to be more economically productive—which then raises the value of time and, subsequently, the pace of life. The consequences of this economic vitality, as the present findings suggest, are mixed. On one hand, the very time stressors that are responsible for success lead to unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking) and stress-related physical problems (notably CHD). On the other hand, the tangible rewards of economic success raise the general level of psychological well-being. People in fast-paced places tend to be happier.^[vi]

Most of the excited commentary on worlds of increasing speed (whether positive or negative) have been generalized diagnoses of the costs or benefits of speeding up. What is often missing is  how speed is differentiated and distributed, how it forms a key part of a politics of mobility.

It is not just high speeds, whether in cars or on foot, that has been coded with positive values. Slow speeds have too. Slow food, slow cities, slow sex – all of these and more have been promoted as antidotes to a speeded-up world suffering, in German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s terms, from an excess of “acceleration”.^[vii] Capitalist society, according to Rosa, forces us into worlds of incessant speed and growth which leads to permanent and increasing levels of stress. The moments when we escape that are, according to his argument, moments when we “resonate” with the world in ways that are non-instrumental. Despite his insistence that slowness, in and of itself, is not the solution to the pathologies of acceleration, his examples of “resonance” include things like a walk in a forest, reading a book, or spending time with art, most of which require significant deceleration from the ambient pace of the world. This general promotion of deceleration, slowness, and resonance is noted by sociologist Filip Vostal in a nuanced critique of the politics of slowness.

Simply stated, there is a powerful cultural discourse maintaining speed as a juggernaut limiting human well-being, jeopardizing progressive social development and reproduction, and negatively impacting nature and ecological systems. Slowness is then depicted as a desirable and necessary antipode to the ‘evil’ fast world and is underpinned by positive and emancipatory connotations.^[viii]

Carl Honoré is one of the leading evangelists for the cult of slowness. His book In Praise of Slow is just the latest in a long line of screeds diagnosing the negative consequences of speed and advocating for a slowing down of almost everything. “Despite Cassandra-like mutterings from the speed merchants”, Honoré writes, “slower, it turns out, often means better – better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex”.^[ix] Honoré argues that we should “seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto – the right speed”.^[x] He interviews Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Italian slow food movement who makes the same point. “Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life” Petrini says, “if today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos”.^[xi]

Neither high speeds nor slowness are good or bad in themselves. While normative lifeworlds have been created around being fast or slow, it is not a particular velocity that will bring happiness, self-actualization, or justice. The focus, instead, should be on both the relations between speed and slowness and the capacity for individuals to have autonomy over their own velocities. It is also important to keep the relational nature of speed in mind. Speed or slowness may feel emancipatory on an individual level but be systematically linked to speeds for others which are imposed rather than chosen. Even for an individual, different phases of high speed and slowness are often logically related. This point is made by Rosa who notes that the provision of moments and spaces of slowness within contemporary capitalism are often little more than an opportunity to regain lost energy which can be used once the fast lane of life is reentered.^[xii]It is no accident that there is a lucrative market selling slowness as a commodity including a whole range of highly expensive alternative therapies, yoga retreats, forest bathing, and the like.

The valorization of slowness as an antidote to the speed of modern life, like similar calls for a return to “authentic” forms of place, brings with it the danger of regressive and reactionary forms of localism. The narrative of technologies of speed leading to time-space compression and globalization leads to a mapping of high speeds on to global scales. Slowness, on the other hand, is all too easily mapped on to searches for an authentic and historically rooted sense of the local. This logic is dangerous. There were, after all, many progressive benefits that came with the opening-up of slow localisms by the technologies of speed. In other words, slowness can also be associated with a narrow and repressive life that can only in retrospect be labelled as “authentic” or somehow in touch with the speed and rhythms of the natural world. One thing that speed allowed, and still allows, is the smashing asunder of regressive forms of conservatism – which is one reason why the enemy of the populist right are often the “globalists”. “In short,” political scientist William E. Scheuerman writes, “we need to confront the normative and institutional difficulties raised by incessant motion and speed without succumbing to a misplaced nostalgia for static and impervious forms of communal life.”^[xiii]

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^[i] See https://datasciencecampus.ons.gov.uk/projects/faster-indicators-of-uk-economic-activity-road-traffic-data-for-england/ (accessed 23/02/2024).

^[ii] D. Jim Walmsley and Gareth J. Lewis, "The Pace of Pedestrian Flows in Cities," Environment and Behavior 21, no. 2 (1989), https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916589212001, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916589212001; Robert V. Levine and Ara Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 30, no. 2 (1999),https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022199030002003, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022022199030002003.

^[iii] Marc H. Bornstein and Helen G. Bornstein, "The pace of life," Nature 259, no. 5544 (1976/02/01 1976),https://doi.org/10.1038/259557a0, https://doi.org/10.1038/259557a0.

^[iv] Walmsley and Lewis, "The Pace of Pedestrian Flows in Cities."

^[v] Levine and Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," 181.

^[vi] Levine and Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," 201.

^[vii] Hartmut Rosa and Bjørn Schiermer, "Acceleration and Resonance: An Interview with Hartmut Rosa," Acta Sociologica E-Special: Four Generations of Critical Theory in Acta Sociologica (2020). https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASJ/Acceleration_and_Resonance.pdf.

^[viii] Filip Vostal, "Slowing down modernity: A critique," Time & Society 28 (2017): 1042.

^[ix] Carl Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed, 1st ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 14. Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1308/2004274150-b.html.

^[x] Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed.

^[xi] Carlo Petrini quoted in Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed, 16.

^[xii] Hartmut Rosa, Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity, New directions for critical theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

^[xiii] William E. Scheuerman, "Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed," Polity 34, no. 1 (2001): 61,https://doi.org/10.2307/3235508, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3235508.