Slow City- The Slow Movement Takes New York Context

Slow City- The Slow Movement Takes New York Context. Slow City imagines a near future where the Slow Movement, an organization that advocates a slow mode of being, has mobilized to actively change the fabric of our cities. Employing tactics that aim to create spaces of resistance, their actions promote the inhabitation of existing spaces in an unusual fashion, utilizing materials normally seen as waste products. We are currently living in a state of hyper capitalism. In order to compete financially, culturally and socially in this hyper condition, individuals need to embrace speed. Mass communication, mass consumption and mass travel are now the norm, even within the developing world. New York, a city that was pivotal in generating this condition, now stands at it’s most majestic  – a model operating as a blueprint for the current developments in Shanghai and Beijing. Governments celebrate this speed, as vast resources are consumed to facilitate progress and growth. Within the fringes of our vast and advanced western cities there are now formed points of criticism and resistance, against this need for endless growth. As a focus for this resistance stand the Slow Movement. Emerging fromItalyin the 1980’s the movement advocates slow a mode of being , as well as promoting a space for critical re-engagement in environmental social, political and cultural action.

The Story So Far.

Through a series of heavyweight financial backers the Slow Movement has been able to start to acquire several existing businesses, as well as areas of prime real estate in New York. Adapting these existing businesses and spaces they start to change the very fabric of the city.

1: Stage One: The Slow Movement acquires ‘Colonial Laundromats’ the largest chain of self-service laundry facilities in Central New York. The laundromats are seen as places of natural slowness within the city. They are intrinsically spaces of reflection and contemplation away from the intensities of city living, a space of forced calm creating spaces to think.

2: Stage Two: Each Laundromat is fitted with a new façade – a faraday curtain. This new copper woven element engulfs each of the laundromats providing not only visual separation from the city but also separation from electromagnetic waves.

3: Underground car parks start to be obtained by the movement, and its financial backers,  as a means to stop the continued reliance on the automobile – a symbol of speed. The slow movement like to walk. These car parks are turned into bathhouses – new social spaces to encourage community interaction, contradicting the isolation and work culture promoted by a contemporary capitalist condition. The bathhouses also provide a space for slow sex – a critical anchor within the slow movement’s philosophies for a healthy society.

4: The city is divided up into smaller areas described as slow cities in order to create more reliance on local communities. Each city roughly containing 10 blocks would have its own bathhouse, slow library, discussion space and church. Every 100 blocks would be a slow cathedral.

5: Lint, a by-product of the Laundromat dryers – composed of cotton, wool and human hair – is collected over decades from dryers all over the city to create a ‘lint felt’. This material is then used to dress the faces of buildings and form temporary roofscapes to the streets. This new urban dress becomes a sound buffer to create a space for slow discussion; the streets then become spaces for debate.

Representation of the project.

To communicate and present this project corporate architectural languages have been employed.  This is a methodology aimed to create an architecture of stealth allowing the propositions to infiltrate viewers’ existing aesthetic sensibilities. This tactic has also been employed in the representation of the project.