Slow Tourism, Food and Cities

Pace and the Search for the "Good Life"

Michael Clancy, Michael Clancy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317415961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

Slow Food began in the late 1980s as a response to the spread of fast food establishments and as a larger statement against globalization and the perceived deterioration of modern life. Since then, slow practices have permeated into other areas, including cities and territories and travel and tourism.

This book provides an in-depth examination of slow food, tourism and cities, demonstrating how these elements are intertwined with one other as part of the modern search for "the good life." Part 1 locates the slow concept within the larger social setting of modernity and investigates claims made by the slow movement, examining aesthetic and instrumental values inherent to it. Part 2 explores the practices and places of slow, containing both conceptual and empirical chapters in Italy, the birthplace of the movement. Part 3 provides a comparative perspective by examining the practices in Spain, the UK, Germany and Canada.

Slow Tourism, Food and Cities offers key theoretical insights and alternative perspectives on the varying practices and meanings of slow from a cultural, sociological and ethical perspective. It is a valuable text for students and scholars of sociology, geography, urban studies, social movements, travel and tourism, and food studies.

1 Introduction

The rise of slow in a fast world

Michael Clancy

Introduction

Over the past several years the Slow Movement has emerged as an alternative set of personal practices juxtaposed with the rapid pace associated with modern life. Originating with the Slow Food movement in Italy in the late 1980s, the modern slow movement has not only spread horizontally to more than 150 nations, but has also grown to encompass new activities and spaces such as locales (cities and territories), travel and tourism, design, medicine, finance, architecture, television, gardening, education, media, sex, television, parenting – even religion (Honoré, 2004, 2013; Parkins & Craig, 2006; Smith & Pattison, 2014). How do we best understand the slow phenomenon itself, its timing, and what it represents as part of the broader politics of everyday life?

The overall slow philosophy and set of practices owe their origin to the Slow Food movement. Started by the Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana (ARCI), the recreation association of the Italian left, Arcigola, the precursor to the Slow Food movement, was created in 1986. Led by Carlo Petrini, the movement famously protested the planned establishment of a McDonald’s restaurant that year at the foot of the Spanish Steps by handing out bowls of pasta (Lindholm & Lie, 2012). Three years later the Slow Food Manifesto was signed in Paris. The manifesto made both aesthetic and ethical claims. Today Slow Food is global in scope and highly institutionalized. It boasts more than 150,000 members in 150 countries. It has 2000 local chapters, sponsors networks of food communities, works to protect biodiversity and sponsors a massive global conference on slow food biannually in Turin. Even when not branded explicitly as “slow,” the effects of the movement are seen daily in the form of farm-to-table restaurants, locavores, the proliferation of farmers markets, pop-up restaurants, farm shares, and the revitalization of craft-made food and drink.

Inspired in part by the Slow Food movement, the mayors of five small Italian towns met in October 1999. Shortly thereafter they produced a Slow Cities (Cittàslow) agreement in an effort to revitalize and protect public spaces and urban life. Their effort was to reclaim public spaces in cities and towns to make them more livable for citizens and visitors alike. By 2017, 238 cities in 30 countries had become members of the Cittàslow network. Cittàslow also became institutionalized, with a formal application process, site visit and assessment for would-be slow cities. The Slow Cities manifesto contains six separate categories with nearly 60 separate criteria upon which cities are assessed. These include environmental policy, infrastructural policy, technology and design for urban quality, promotion of local production, support for Slow Food activities, hospitality and adherence to Cittàslow (Manella, this volume).

Slow tourism first emerged early in the twenty-first century and while influenced by Slow Food and cities, experienced a more organic origin. Many trace the named activity to a website, slowtravel.org, where users shared their experiences traveling more deliberately and with self-awareness (McGrath and Sharpley, this volume). Heitmann et al. (2011, 117) describe slow tourism as “a form of tourism that respects local cultures, history and environment, and values social responsibility while celebrating diversity and connecting people (tourists with other tourists and host communities).” This definition places slow tourism directly under the umbrella of ethical tourism in that it contains a social component to it directed toward an “other.” While one might argue that the activity is not at all new, it has only appeared under the name “slow tourism” beginning shortly after the turn of the century when this virtual community began to appear. Soon one market summary produced in 2007 predicted that slow tourism would grow by at least 10 percent annually over the next five years and “become a significant alternative to ‘sun and sea’ and cultural tourism” (Euromonitor International, 2007, quoted in Lumsden and McGrath 2011, 266).

These better-known movements have spawned additional slow activities, including slow money, parenting, gardening, design, fashion, and art. Parkins and Craig (2006, 1) suggest a deeper social purpose of the movement in that it “declare[s] the value of slowness in our work, in our personal life, in public life, is to promote a position counter to the dominant value system of ‘the times.’” Although Slow proponents primarily make individualistic claims involving quality (slow is better), there are also important social, ethical and aesthetic issues at stake. How do we best understand the rise of slow and the ethical claims it makes? Is it best understood as a new form of “life politics” (Giddens, 1991; Rojek, 2010), and if so, what are the implications in terms content and consequences of this new form of politics, particularly within the realm of citizenship?

In order to answer these questions we need to (1) place the rise of the slow movement within a specific socio-historical moment, (2) examine the rhetoric associated with the movement, (3) describe the larger set of practices of which the slow movement is a part, and (4) examine slow on the ground – in other words, how it manifests itself in action. Slow Food, Tourism and Cities aims to do just that through its various contributions. The remainder of the chapter will discuss not just the rise of the slow movement itself, but do so within a larger backdrop of modernity and the cult of speed. This speed has produced, among other things, a crisis of traditional politics and practices of citizenship. Following this backdrop the chapter closes with a brief summary of the chapters to come.

Locating slow

The Slow movement is contentious, not simply in its desirability but in its very nature and what it signifies. On one side are those who see the set of slow practices lacking social significance, being “bourgeois” (Cresswell, 2010 on slow tourism) or confined to a small set of urban elites (DuPuis & Goodman, 2005; Veseth, 2006 on slow food). Similarly, writing on Slow Food, Tomlinson views it as a narrow Luddite movement that “defends existing enclaves of interest” (2007, 148). At the other sit observers such as Schneider (2008), who places it within the larger contemporary social movement category, suggesting it shares important political and organizational features as other social movements. Similarly Haenfler et al. (2012) and Parkins and Craig (2006) categorize it as a lifestyle movement in that it reclaims the nature of everyday individual activities. Lindholm and Zúquete (2010) go even further. They refer to slow as an anti-globalization “aurora movement” on par with al Qaeda, the Zapatista rebels in Mexico and the neo-fascist National Front in France! The point here is that how we classify this movement directly affects what we think of its ultimate promise. An additional caveat: slow is not a single unified movement; various aspects of it started at different times. Some elements (food, tourism) relate directly to consumption habits while others (cities, homes, regions) to spatial organization and still others (parenting, religion) to daily personal and family practices. As a result we need to be careful in our generalizations.

Modernity and the cult of speed

Despite those caveats, we, as social scientists, still need to gain a deeper understanding of collective social activities whatever they may be. One way to begin is locate a social phenomenon within a larger social and historical context, and in addition, to think about what it is not or what it is against. In this case the answer is simple: speed. Following Virilio, Mark Taylor (2014) argues that velocity has been the core value of modernity. The promise of speed has been totalizing, lying at the heart of values of utility, productivity, efficiency, competition and consumption. Tomlinson (2007) also places the origin of acceleration at the emergence and subsequent domination of capitalist society and urbanization. Speed has not just permeated market relations, but also social and political ones. Weber (1978) defines modern bureaucracy partially on its precision and efficiency. The point of all this is that the promise of speed under modernity has always been the promise of the good life. Taylor shows that early promoters of speed promised more leisure time and relatedly, more happiness. Richard Nixon predicted a four-day workweek in 1956 and in the mid-1960s a U.S. Senate subcommittee heard expert testimony that by the end of the twentieth century, Americans would be working only 14 hours per week.

Writing on the same topic, Duffy (2009) points out that speed as both a desirable means and end arose with capitalist relations but itself became a product of the market in the twentieth century. As such modernity no longer promised speed directly, but rather the possible access to speed. Speed became valued not just simply within production, particularly the clock time under Taylor’s scientific management, but also a commodity unto itself. As with many other commodities, however, public discourse regarding speed has continued to emphasize not just its desirability but also its widespread accessibility. Nowhere has this been felt more than in the typical household in postindustrial countries. The twentieth century brought such labor-saving (read speed) appliances as the washer/dryer, microwave, and convection oven, to say nothing of new food products such as cake mixes and frozen dinners. Michael Pollan (2014) reports that today the average American household spends just 27 minutes daily preparing meals, down some 50 percent from the 1960s. Major technological advances today involve speed and efficiency, whether it is broadband, smart objects, or delivery times for products or services.

The promise of ever-increasing speed and efficiency has changed our primary values. Waiting or moving slowly is to be avoided, whether at the checkout at the supermarket, the highway, security at the airport. In fact many of our social inventions are created in order to avoid just these time bottlenecks – witness the express lane in the store, fast track through airport security, the fast lane on highways and urgent care health-care facilities. Behind all of this is the promise that spending less time in producing and reproducing life will give us more leisure time, thus making us happier. And therein lies the problem. By most accounts, people living in the lap of late modernity are working a great deal more than expected, and they report being not all together happy.

Certainly recent studies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggest the promises of speed and efficiency for happiness have not been realized. Among the findings are that on average OECD workers who have full-time jobs work roughly 1765 hours per year (which averages out to just under 34 hours per week on a 52-week workweek annually), although that figure varies significantly, ranging from the average full-time worker in Mexico (2226) to the Netherlands (1381) (OECD, 2014a). An alternative measure is the percentage of full-time workforce working very long hours (defined as more than 50 hours per week). Here the OECD average is just nine percent but again with wide variation. In Turkey 43 percent or workers exceed the 50-hour-per-week threshold while in Mexico the figure is 29 percent. At the other end of the spectrum are Sweden (1.1 percent) and the Netherlands (0.5 percent) (OECD, 2014a). Some of this is due to the re-blurring of clock time. Disappearing is the clear demarcation between work time and non-work time, but as Taylor (2014) points out people also internalize the imperative of work. According to the U.S. Travel Association, in 2015 American workers failed to use 222 million paid days off and more than half of all workers (55 percent) left at least some allotted vacation time unused. On average they took 16 vacation days, down from an average of 20.3 between 1976 and 2000 (USTA, 2016). In short, if one promise of speed was less time at work, there is little evidence this has come to be the case.

The other implicit promise of modernity has been achievement of the good life through speed. Directly this was to come in the form of more leisure time, and indirectly in the form of abundance. And to be sure, most measures of abundance show vast material improvement over time (OECD, 2014b). Yet whether this has translated into happiness, especially as of late, is not at all clear.¹ In fact, many contemporary studies of happiness indicate otherwise. The OECD, interested in quality of life for its residence, here creates a 10-point scale for comparative purposes. In a 2013 survey it reports “very high happiness” on average for residents of Canada, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland (7.4 or higher on the scale), while countries with very low happiness include Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Portugal and Turkey (5.5 or lower) (OECD, 2013). The well-known Easterlin Paradox found that self-reported happiness is not correlated with economic growth or well-being², and the OECD study tends to confirm that. In Mexico, for example, with one of the lower GDP per capita figures among the 36 OECD nations, and also among those with a high percentage of people living long hours, happiness levels ranked eighth. In contrast much wealthier Japan ranked 28th.

More revealing are findings that relative happiness levels among residents in affluent countries have remained flat or declined over time. De Neve et al. (2014) show that among several Western European countries reported life satisfaction improved slightly in Sweden and Denmark between 1970 and 2013 but they were the outliers. More common were countries like France, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, which experienced almost no change in self-reported happiness from residents. More surprising were the experiences of Spain and Ireland – which experienced major economic and political transformations during that time but again saw no real change in reported happiness – and Portugal and Greece, which showed significant declines in life satisfaction despite making major material gains.

Separately the World Happiness Report comes to similar conclusions, though its longitudinal span is from only 2007 from 12, a period coinciding with the global financial crisis. That study shows increases in the average level of self-reported subjective wellbeing (happiness) in many countries in the world but also absolute declines in Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand (Helliwell Layard & Sachs, 2013). From this, De Neve et al. (2014) hypothesize that happiness levels are as much as eight times more susceptible to negative economic factors as positive ones.

The crisis of citizenship

It should come as no surprise that accompanying this failure to deliver on the promise of the “good life” as evidenced by the self-reporting of life satisfaction in many of the world’s wealthiest societies has been a decline in traditional forms...