A manifesto for Slow Space

From Access to Slow Space

So What is Normal? suggests that there are limitations in concepts of accessibility and inclusive design which stop us thinking about disability and architecture creatively. But as well as criticising existing assumptions, we want to propose an alternative idea, which is positive, thought-provoking, useful and resonant to architectural students, tutors and practitioners. We want to connect into other key issues in design– particularly sustainability – and to start from a creative attitude, centred on the rich diversity of people which includes disability, but is not only about disability. This is where the idea of Slow Space comes in.

The notion of Slow also contains a deliberate element of ‘reclaiming’ for disabled people. Slow can too often have negative connotations; that someone is a bit ‘stupid’, their movements restricted, laborious and therefore time-consuming, or needing ‘support’. In a world which highly values mobility, speed, independence and personal autonomy, ‘slow’ is a problem; the response to taking time 'unnecessarily', to needing ‘help’, often one of irritation or awkwardness. But what is wrong with doing things slowly? What about 'thinking' slowness as:

Close looking

• being attentive to the details of everyday life and spaces

• valuing sensory clarity and richness

• finding the pleasures in particularities and peculiarities

• creating and making with thoughtfulness and a concern for quality

• treating people and the world with respect

• refusing to live in a state of distraction

Encountering

• taking careful notice of the perspectives of others

• critically analysing and engaging creatively with small scale everyday social and spatial practices

• taking pleasure in diversity, complexity and human frailty

• enabling equality of dialogue, without suppressing difference

• having awareness of, taking time over, and enabling equally negotiated exchanges

• showing generosity in mutual support and interdependencies

• refusing the 'high speed' and competitive pressures of contemporary life

Creating

• developing a critical awareness of difference and its potential for generating creative action

• being idealistic and passionate, but still happily embedded in the messy compromises of everyday life

• taking time over creative processes of transformation, via noticing, meeting, sharing, making and interpreting

• being aware of the ethics of what one does * locating oneself in processes as an equal participant, who can offer particular knowledge and skills, but can also learn from others

• finding ways of exploring how people are ‘positioned’ by difference in everyday social and spatial practices, in ways that are inequitable and need to be challenged

• being concerned to prevent wastefulness of both human and natural resources

You can see that our ideas for Slow are not about ‘special needs’ or technical solutions or design guidance. Slow space is much more about attitudes, about how we operate in the world everyday. Quite where such an interest in changing attitudes will lead us is still to be found out…………….