Here, we want to introduce an alternative idea to illustrate what we mean about re-thinking relationships between disability and architecture, beyond accessibility and inclusive design. We call this concept Slow Space.

Slow Space links to the Slow Food and Slow Cities (Cittaslow) movements which are concerned with sustainability and quality of life. Slow Space extends these ideas, from a disability-led perspective, to make difference - and engagement with difference - central. We believe that the sustainability agenda must be about human resources as well as natural resources, that it needs to be about social inclusion as well as material processes.

But this is not just about disability, or only 'for' disabled people. Slow Space explores what happens both when we enjoy taking time in our lives; and when 'slowing things down' helps us closely, critically and creatively interrogate the particularities of our different social and spatial relationships. Rather than living our lives in a state of (harrassed) distraction, where we take the 'normal' for granted and fail to notice other perspectives on the world, living in slow space offers opportunities for new kinds of close looking.

Masa Kajita's MA project at the Royal College of Art is called ‘Action-Rooms’, a proposed health education facility focusing on nutrition to improve the health and lifestyle of residents in Hackney, London.

But this is 'Slow' action - the design concept emerged in dialogue with the older people and children, and was about allowing time for changing clothes, meals and other activities. The design aims to avoid distinctions between static space and movement space. It is long and thin in form, absorbing level changes through gently sloping floors and generously accommodating differences in experience through programmatic proximities set in layers.

We want to reclaim the concept of ‘slow’. 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, speed, independence and personal autonomy, ‘slow’ is a problem; the response to taking time 'unnecessarily' often one of irritation or awkwardness.

But what is wrong with doing things slowly? What about 'thinking' slowness as attention to detail, sensory clarity and richness, careful thoughtfulness and increased enjoyment in the immediacy and particularities of each moment?

A really significant element in ascribing beauty to a thing lies not within itself but in the quality of our attention to it..

Mark Cocker_Crow Country_Jonathan Cape 2007

Becoming intensively attentive to the details of everyday life and its spaces is central to the education and practice of architecture and design. Yet it is something we find hard to both teach and learn. Slow Space focuses that attention.

We also offer this as another way of making the ordinary extraordinary - very much a contemporary vogue for including playfulness and lateral connections in the design process. Slow Space is not about making the strange 'familiar'. Instead it suggests that design can be generated from a deep attention to, and celebration of, our differences - the rich diversity in ways that our bodies work and the many and various relationships we have to things, spaces and each other.

This is architectural design as a kind of craft-work:

(Craft) advocates a kind of patient attentiveness, a kind of waiting that is so often derided as a waste of time in an age obsessed with purpose, targets and goals….why is this kind of enduring enthusiasm regarded as ‘weird’ or ‘sad’… Have our interests become so undemanding, easily dropped and often put towards another purpose (career, profit)…?

Madeline Bunting Guardian Monday July 30 2007 p25

Craft also has a bad name; here we think of 'crafting' as having the potential to be highly conceptual – that ideas can be generated from close attentiveness to the detailed quality of inter-relationships and everyday spatial practices (rather than starting from abstract ideas, which are then detailed 'up'). This crafting joins the sensual with the social.

This large installation, by David Dixon, uses the slow re-crafting of dust "to question the hegemony of absolute values" and the transient nature of reality.

It is only at slower speeds that events can be both more carefully observed and more fully lived; that patterns of encounters can be explored, analysed to see if and where some are disadvantaged compared to others.

This means not taking everyday small-scale seen but unnoticed practices and encounters 'for granted', as transparent and obvious to 'everyone'.

It means not living in a 'state of distraction' - in both its variations:

(Walter) Benjamin’s definition of distraction oscillates between an active form – distraction as deviation from habitual behaviour – and a passive form – a state of absent-mindedness enforced by habit and repetition.

Stan Allen_(1995:52)_quoted in Hill 2003:27

This kind of attentiveness starts to help develop a critical awareness of difference and its potential for generating creative action. We want architects and other designers to be idealistic and passionate about positively transforming the world, but to remain happily embedded in the messy compromises of everyday life. We want design process to include the taking of time over creative processes of transformation, via noticing, meeting, sharing, making and interpreting.

And we want to get to a place where participants - architects, users, artists - engage in design processes as equals, each able to offer particular knowledge and skills, but also respecting and learning from others.

Click here to watch Tom Shakespeare talking about creative diversity from a disability perspective.

Part of this more careful and critical noticing/thinking means being attentive to the gaps, flaws and unintended consequences in our assumptions about what is 'normal'. The English language connects slow to making mistakes, and to faulty or inferior - the opposite of 'getting things right'. But working with inexactness and the beauty of imperfection can offer alternative and interesting ways of thinking about the design of the built environment.

This kind of slowness is not backward-looking or conservative or lazy. It demands innovative thinking and practice, energy and social engagement.

We think that imagining what Slow Space might be like can challenge the thoughtless unevenness that the built environment offers to different people in terms of access and other pleasures. It demands that we refuse to continue building barriers to equal participation in society and develop a more equitable and sustainable distribution of resources.

Enabling everyone to taking time to enjoy and enrich the diversity and difference of experience is a positive and creative aim. Material space costs money and time. It is a limited resource, which benefits some people more than others. We want to be more generous….especially to the people who currently get the least, in terms of our buildings and cities.

Slow Space is thus not just about making better spaces for disabled and deaf people - although it is also centrally concerned with this - but also about being part of a larger progressive movement.

The Slow City movement (Cittaslow) grew out of Slow Food festivals in Italy. It was founded in Orvieto in 1999 and has now extended to towns and cities in several European countries, including the UK:

The goal is to foster the development of places that enjoy a robust vitality based on good food, healthy environments, sustainable economies and the seasonality and traditional rhythms of community life.

Paul L. Knox, “Creating Ordinary Places: Slow Cities in a Fast World” Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 10. No. 1, 1–11, February 2005

The Cittaslow Charter has 7 principles and 55 'requirements for excellence'. One central principle is:

• quality of hospitality is promoted as a real moment of connection with the community and its features, removing physical and cultural obstacles that may prejudice the full and widespread use of city resources.

Our first attempt at a Slow Space manifesto sets out some - rather idealistic - principles. The implications for design will, we hope be developed, incorporating a disability-led perspective.

There is no single answer and there will be many disagreements and differences. That is both positive and centrally human.

What we know is, we don't need any more technical solutions to, or design guidance about, the 'problem' of disability. We need new attitudes, different approaches, passion and creativity - just like every other aspect of architectural design.