Slow Art in the Creative City

Global Amsterdam

This article is about art, globalization, and cities. Addressing these concerns in relation to street photography and urban renewal initiatives in the city of Amsterdam, our broad aim is to examine slowness as a condition in contemporary urban life, articulated and operationalized in visual cultural and spatial practice. In particular, we explore what happens when photography strategically decelerates, disrupts, reroutes, or even stops movement, flow, and interaction in the global city in order to refocus attention on issues of place, community, and belonging. We argue that these interruptive practices connect in the examples that follow to a contemporary trend within cultural activism—the so-called “slow movement”—which emphasizes slowness as a strategy for confronting globalization, neoliberalism, and the associated accelerations of everyday life, transport, communication, and economic exchange.

The slow movement can be understood as a strategic reaction to today’s “culture of speed” (Tomlinson, 2007), which finds its most extreme expression in contemporary global cities. The philosopher Paul Virilio has given a largely pessimistic account of the interrelation between speed and cities, arguing that the emergence of technological “speed-space” ultimately destabilizes the city as “a territorial localization, and also as a place of an assumed right, affirmed by policy” (Virilio, 1986/2001, pp. 80-81). Accordingly, cities as locations of community and political interaction “are undone by technology, undone by television, defeated by automobility,” resulting in a fragmented, depoliticized “society of the non-place”(Virilio, 1986/2001, p. 81).

By analyzing a selection of street photography projects that were all realized in the city of Amsterdam in 2012 as part of urban renewal initiatives, we argue that the interrelation between speed, cities, society, and politics is more complex than alarmist accounts such as Virilio’s recognize. In particular, the article provides a case study of urban visual practices that strategically employ slowness as a means of creating (and reflecting on) modes of citizenship under the current “global-urban condition” (McCann & Ward, 2011). Instead of interpreting these photography projects as being solely a form of resistance against the lived experience of gentrification and social fragmentation in the accelerated city, we also show how slow art can simultaneously become complicit with neoliberal globalization and the imperatives of contemporary urban development.

Drawing on Jamie Peck’s (2011) work on the creative city as a portable paradigm of city profiling and global inter-city competition, our discussion offers a critical account of how creativity and slowness have become increasingly popular, exploitable, and intertwining ideals of a cosmopolitan citizenship. In addition, our specific focus on urban photography—on slow visual art—makes it possible to examine how strategies of halting, delaying, and diverting the flows of the global city actually engage with both the aesthetics and the semiotics of visual montage, zooming, distortion, and reflection. The intertwining of urban rhythms and modes of perception is therefore crucial to our understanding of slowness as a strategy of creative interruption within the global city.

This understanding of slow art as a form of intervention in the multiple rhythms of urban everyday life draws on Henri Lefebvre’s (2004) method of “rhythmanalysis” which, as Tim Edensor explains in his reappraisal of Lefebvre, offers “an exemplary method through which to mediate between overdrawn, static reifications of place [and] hyperbolic accounts about spaces of flows” (Edensor, 2010, p. 18). Approaching the city as a complex “ensemble of normative rhythms and counter rhythms” (Edensor, 2010, p. 4) allows us to analyze slow art’s strategic engagement with the polyrhythmic mobilities of the global city, produced via the interplay of urban architectures, bodies, and technologies; municipal regulations; economic production and exchange; as well as inhabitants’ efforts to play with or subvert such city-rhythms. These multiple dimensions of urban “rhythmanalysis” inform our reading of urban space and creative practice in Amsterdam.

Alongside more prominent cities such as New York, London, or Tokyo, which have long attracted sustained critical attention in globalization studies dating back to Saskia Sassen’s The Global City (1991), Amsterdam is a key location for studying urban culture, practice, and policy in the era of globalization. The city has a long, deep history of transnational exchange dating back to the Dutch Golden Age. More recently, Amsterdam has become a site of growing tension between efforts to sustain cultural heritage and efforts to develop the city’s global potential as a financial/cultural hub in the style of London or Paris (Lindner, 2012). This has resulted in a double identity for Amsterdam—in mainstream urban branding terms—as both a heritage city nostalgically rooted in the past and a global city aggressively oriented toward the future (Nijman, 1999). Since the countercultural turn of the 1960s, Amsterdam has also emerged as a hotspot of urban creativity, social experiment, and spatial reordering. Add to this Amsterdam’s “other” identities as a postcolonial city of exclusion and, of course, as a sin-city (home to the world’s most iconic red light district) and it is clear that many of the core components of urban citizenship—such as place, community, and belonging—are in rapid flux.

It is against this backdrop that we want to examine the interplay of photography and urban renewal. Our focus is on two very different but interrelating forms of creative intervention in public urban space: the first is construction sites and the second is community art. To explain how and why we connect one to the other, we proceed to situate the two spaces/practices in relation to Amsterdam’s current municipal creativity policies. We then address our conceptualization and use of the term slow art, which builds on existing research on public art as a potential “bridge gentrifier” (Zukin, 1995, cited in Mathews, 2010, p. 672), promoted to attract investment and aesthetically frame urban change (Mathews, 2010; Miles 1997).

First, however, we need to explain that, in this article, we understand construction sites as spaces of encounter within the global city, an idea which is imaginatively explored in the case studies we cite, where building work and artwork are deliberately conjoined. Our shift to community art later in the article is intended to problematize our findings about construction sites by contrasting them with street photography that foregrounds the global city not as a site to be glossed over, homogenized, or flattened, but instead as a basis for reconstituting urban citizenship.

What our examples of construction sites and community art have in common is that they mark responses to the perceived inauthenticity of place in contemporary cities. This, however, is not to suggest that such interruptions of globalization are necessarily lasting, profound, or even productive. Rather, our argument is that, however temporarily and often unintentionally, urban slow art can register a tension within contemporary cities between movement and stasis, memory and futurity, continuity and change.

Recreative City

In his 2011 article “Recreative City: Amsterdam, Vehicular Ideas and the Adaptive Spaces of Creativity Policy,” Jamie Peck presents a critical analysis of Amsterdam’s creativity policies over the preceeding decade. Examining the enthusiastic engagement of Dutch urban planners with the creative turn in urban policy making—a turn that he largely ascribes to Richard Florida’s (2002) “paradigm-making book” The Rise of the Creative Class (Peck, 2011, p. 463)—Peck criticizes the discursive deployment of the creative city idea as a political strategy to “celebrate culture and embrace growth at the same time” (2011, p. 465). The notion of creativity hence becomes a vehicle—a “vehicular idea” (McLennan, 2004)—of neoliberal urbanism, appropriating urban creative culture as an exploitable selling point within the broader global city competition for status and capital.

Enthusiastically embracing Florida’s three T guideline of technology, talent, and tolerance for successful urban development (Florida, 2005), the city of Amsterdam has launched a series of policies that are meant to attract art, design, and media professionals as well as facilitate creative self-employment. For instance, Amsterdam has taken up ideas that originate from its squatting movement to make available work spaces for creative professionals. Known as the broedplaatsen (breeding places) project, this policy involves arranging and subsidizing atelier rooms in abandoned and underutilized real estate, encouraging creative professionals to “occupy” those spaces and develop projects that have the potential to become profitable in the future (Figure 1). Yet the problem that Peck (2011) identifies regarding the broedplaatsen policy is that, instead of changing the more structural problem of overpriced housing and unequal access to space, the project enables selected professionals to temporarily bypass the reality of Amsterdam’s real estate market. Avoiding substantive political reforms and high financial commitments, the city can thus promote creativity without having to implement new social welfare policies.

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Figure 1.

Kunststad (Art City) broedplaats at NDSM Wharf in Amsterdam-Noord, 2008.

Taking the broedplaatsen project as a controversial example of Amsterdam succumbing to the “Florida effect” (Peck, 2011, p. 480), Peck’s more general critique of Amsterdam’s efforts to promote creative industry start-ups addresses what he calls the “domestification” and economization of creativity according to the “political-economic conditions of neoliberalizing cities” (2011, p. 482). The centrally managed incorporation of all cultural activity into the overarching business goal of strengthening Amsterdam’s image as an international “Top City” (Topstad) transforms creativity into a new-economy booster. However, being caught up in the global market rules of competition, work flexibility, individual self-responsibility, and urban competition for investment, this new economy actually “conforms . . . with the constraints of flex-labor markets, sociospatial polarization, endemic interurban competition, and gentrified housing markets” (Peck, 2011, p. 479). Therefore, creative capitals “exhibit higher rates of socioeconomic inequality than other cities” (Peck, 2009, p. 8).

What is particularly relevant about Peck’s argument is that his critique of creative city policies ties in with a broader claim about the forms of mobility and urban citizenship that creativity policies generate:

Creative subjects are celebrated for their hypermobility and for their strictly circumscribed, individualistic commitments to place. These economic hipsters thrive in buzzing 24/7 neighborhoods, where they can satisfy their craving for “heart-throbbingly real” experiences, but at the drop of a hat may chose to relocate to an even more happening place. (Peck, 2009, p. 6)

According to Peck, the creative economy’s hypermobility brings about an increasing detachment from place and community. This goes hand in hand with the commodification of urban places, allowing mobile citizens to consume the feeling of place as an event—that is, as an experience of manufactured authenticity that comes without social bonds or responsibilities.

Slow Art

It is against this background of the recreative city and its vehicularity that we examine examples of urban slow art: aesthetic interventions that emerge from, but also counter, the conditions of speed, mobility, and invisibility (anonymity) that have become so ubiquitous in rapidly globalizing cities, while simultaneously connecting with the creative turn in urban policy making. Urban slow art thus constitutes a field of tension between resistance against and promotion of the neoliberal transformation of urban space.

This ambivalent capacity to both resist and promote spatial inequalities in the city has also been linked to public art in general. Malcolm Miles (1997), for instance, recognizes the potential of public art to act as a catalyst for political imagination and “a reaction against the commoditization of art by its markets and institutions” (p. 4). Yet he also recognizes that, when incorporated into urban development, public art may also be used to “distract attention from social issues” and become “complicit in the consequent social fragmentation” (1997, p. 64). In a similar vein, Vanessa Mathews claims that public art supports government officials, developers, and private investors in “framing urban change,” and therefore constitutes “a major component in a multifaceted strategy to alleviate the social ills characterizing contemporary urban spaces, including declining population rates, high unemployment, derelict and underused lands and buildings, and a waning sense of place” (Mathews, 2010, p. 667). Though Miles and Mathews disagree about public art’s capacity to act as a “placemaker”—Mathews viewing art as “vital in the (re)construction of place identity” (2010, p. 672) and Miles questioning art’s placemaking potential, pointing to divergences in the reception of art in public space (1997, p. 9)—both highlight public art’s deployment to aestheticize urban transformation.

This article builds on these insights but specifically focuses on public art practices that strategically engage with the paces/temporalities of spatial transformation and social interaction in the global city. We use the term slow art because of the connection it suggests to the various slow movements that have sprung up in cities worldwide, beginning most notably with the slow food movement, but also extending to other, more recent slow practices such as urban farming, yarn bombing, and guerilla gardening. To these, we could add an entire list of interrelating spin-off movements, including slow money, slow travel, slow fashion, slow design, slow parenting, slow media, and slow science.

What these various slow movements have in common is a politically motivated desire to resist the accelerated pace of contemporary life in order to promote values and concepts such as community, sustainability, justice, roots, quality, and belonging. Yet as Wendy Parkins (2004) points out in an article on the ethics and goals of the slow movement:

slow living is not a slow-motion version of postmodern life; nor does it offer a parallel temporality for slow subjects to inhabit in isolation from the rest of the culture. Slow living involves the conscious negotiation of the different temporalities which make up our everyday lives, deriving from a commitment to occupy time more attentively. (p. 363)

As a form of activism, therefore, slowness does not refer to a single mode of temporality but, rather, describes the versatile strategies of consciously dealing with the mobilities of the early 21st century. Slowness may thus be thought of in the plural—as multifold “slownesses”—just as it has become common to speak of mobility as “mobilities” in contemporary critical theory (Urry, 2007).

On the one hand, this renewed understanding of mobility has occurred partly in response to the way globalization’s time-space compression exerts a “power geometry” (Massey, 1991, p. 25), dividing between those mobilities that are chosen and those that are enforced, as well as acknowledging the fact that the mobility of certain world citizens can cause or necessitate the immobility of others. On the other hand, the recognition of mobility as a plurality results from an increasing amount of scholarship that has been devoted to researching the concrete assemblages of actors, technologies, and protocols that compose different forms of mobility (Cresswell & Merriman, 2011).

It is similarly important to recognize that there are diverse forms of slowness, differing in terms of quality, experience, and intention. Whether slowness implies intensity of boredom, interruption, or prolongation, an effect of (or resistance against) movement and acceleration depends on the various contexts and techniques through which slowness is realized. As David Bissel and Gillian Fuller (2011) point out in their work on the related concept stillness:

Stillness might emerge through other configurations of matter which are not necessarily reducible to the dialectic of mobility and immobility. What happens if we think stillness not only as rhythm, but also as technic or trope? As attunement or perception? As interruption or ingress? Breaking with this impulse to understand still as always a relation of movement will help to illuminate the multiplicity of ontological and epistemological registers through which still moves. (p. 6)

Adapting Bissel and Fuller’s thinking on stillness, our analysis of photographic slow art is centered on precisely the idea that slowness has different modalities.

Similar to the various slow movements described above, the urban slow art we discuss next shares an emphasis on the deceleration and even stoppage of urban mobilities. Nonetheless, it differs in at least three important ways. First, rather than being produced under conditions of slowness (like slow food) or outside and against the spatial regulations of the city (like guerilla gardening or yarn bombing), the slow art of construction and community is produced under conditions of speed and movement and—crucially—within authorized city-marketing and urban development strategies. This kind of aestheticizing of urban change and public space therefore operates within a highly regulated environment, even if that environment is characterized by transience and transformation. In this sense, our examples of slow art are deeply implicated in the global urban spectacle of speed and flash, even if they are also frequently critical or indirectly resistant toward that spectacle.

The second important difference is that the slow art of construction lacks the political motivation and grassroots organization driving other slow movements, even though the art itself often has strong community ties and fixed geo-historical coordinates. In other words, this is not a conscious or coordinated movement in any explicit sense, but instead an uneven symptomatic response to urban life under the accelerated conditions of globalization. This situation, however, becomes more complicated when applied to the slow art of community, but that is a point we address later on.

Perhaps the most significant difference, however, is that most of the slow art we discuss is not necessarily designed to be about slowness at all, or even conceived as being connected to globalization and mobility. In this sense, the art is only accidentally, incidentally, or superficially slow, a slowness of affect and appearance only. It is this ambivalent articulation of slowness, we argue, that makes these particular iterations of street photography so productive to study in relation to globalization and urban creativity.

Construction Sites

Construction sites stand out as spaces of rapid transformation and reordering where contemporary discourses surrounding urban planning (such as those of the smart city, the sustainable city, and the creative city) find both material and symbolic expression, and where a broader spatial dynamic of resistance and regeneration can be played out in public view. It is therefore of particular interest to consider what role construction sites can play in simultaneously slowing down and speeding up urban flows, ranging from the circulation of people, traffic, capital, and data, to the movement of ideas, values, images, and styles.

In the city of Amsterdam, archival urban photography from the late-19th century, as well as contemporary photo projects, are being deployed in large-scale formats by artists, developers, and city planners in coordinated efforts to screen urban change and produce nostalgic and idealized images of urban stasis, all set against the backdrop of the amnesiac, accelerated urbanism of globalization. As Anne Cronin points out in her study of advertising billboards in the United Kingdom, such efforts to shape public perceptions of urban change frequently occur around sites of demolition and rebuilding:

As part of the everyday urban environment, billboards and panels articulate certain temporalities and spatialities, and help shape people’s sense of engagement with these changes . . . It is clear that billboards, wraps and panels tap into and shape the temporalities that are produced both by the dereliction and ruination of old buildings, and by sites as they are being demolished or regenerated. (Cronin, 2010, p. 130)

Similar to the British advertising billboards that Cronin analyzes, the artworks installed around construction sites in Amsterdam interfere with the ways in which the public experiences and interprets the city’s sociospatial development in time. Here, the aestheticization of urban change transforms these sites into something we might call temporary “places” in the fully loaded sense of the word: contingent sites of focalized meaning produced, in these instances, by the interplay of memory, visuality, and urban change.

Figure 2, for instance, shows 19th-century photographs, sourced from the collections of the Amsterdam City Archives, being used to decorate the “Piet Hein” construction site in the popular Kinkerbuurt area in the West of the city, where a new apartment complex is being built. Passersby see a poster overhanging the construction site. It displays a digitally produced simulation of the apartment complex, illustrating the street corner’s future appearance once the building is finished. In sharp contrast, large prints of black-and-white photographs—installed at the borderline between street and construction site—show the old appearance of the neighborhood in the 1890s (Figure 3). Reminiscent of a shop-window front, the nostalgic installation invites passersby to slow down and look at the photographs.

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Figure 2.

“Piet Hein” construction site, Amsterdam, 2012.

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Figure 3.

“Piet Hein” construction site: Archival photograph of the Kinkerstraat, 2012.

The desired effect of this invitation to slow down and look is that of time travel, creating an historical sense of place by visually relating the site’s present and future to a nostalgic, decolorized memory of its absent past. Yet this photographic mural is about more than just creating an imaginary timeline of the neighborhood’s social and architectural development throughout the past century. As decorative blinds, the photographs also hide the current renewal of this neighborhood, using place nostalgia as a means of concealing and distracting from urban change, including in this instance the associated gentrification and architectural homogenization that is not only symbolized but also actualized by the new apartment complex.

This dynamic of effacement and distraction is also evident in another street photography project realized at the same time in 2012 at Haarlemmerplein, a central square near to Amsterdam’s historic city center. In this case, the building under construction is designed to accommodate not just apartments but also shops and an underground parking garage. As the website of the project’s construction company explains,

Heijmans has begun execution of the Haarlemmerplein project in the centre of Amsterdam. This inner-city area is being developed by Heijmans Vastgoed (property) in collaboration with the Amsterdam municipality. Haarlemmerplein has remained undeveloped for some 30 years, with the project intended to reinterpret its use. The project’s expected yield is around €25 million.

The plan comprises 47 owner-occupied apartments, 22 rental apartments, 1,200 m2 of shop space and a 3.5-level underground parking garage with around 200 bays. The rental residences have been sold to De Key housing association, while the section of the garage containing public parking bays will be delivered to Parkeergebouwen Amsterdam. The building was designed by Dick van Gameren of the Architectengroep. Construction is expected to last some three years. (Heijmans, 2006)

As this public statement makes clear by including an estimation of the building project’s expected yield, the urban renewal taking place at Haarlemmerplein is above all economically motivated. It is consistent with the neoliberal approach of developing new property for real estate investment and aggressively tapping urban public space for commercial usage.

Interestingly—but not accidentally—the artistic project that surrounds and decorates the Haarlemmerplein construction site deals with a completely different subject than that of the new building complex. Funded by the city of Amsterdam and installed by the construction company, the project consists of a series of photographs by local artist Jan Theun van Rees that, as the informational sign accompanying the installation explains,

. . . connects different interiors of the surrounding homes and businesses in unexpected/surprising combinations. Moving from photo to photo will take you on a voyage of discovery through strange, striking, and sometimes hidden places on the Haarlemmerplein.

Focusing on intimate domestic details within the photographed homes, the project employs close-ups and an aesthetic emphasis on vivid color to produce an almost surreal impression of the different domestic details, rooms, and spaces displayed (Figures 4 and 5).

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Figure 4.

Haarlemmerplein construction site and photography project, 2012.

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Figure 5.

Section of photo-mural at Haarlemmerplein, 2012.

As the project’s description outlines, viewers are invited to undertake an urban discovery tour, newly familiarizing themselves with the hidden, private spaces of the neighborhood while simultaneously fulfilling the quasi-touristic, adventurous desire of experiencing unknown places and sensations. The imaginary crossing of the boundary between urban public and private space generates a virtual nearness—an imaginary moment of acquaintance with the neighborhood—which is almost immediately countered by the estranging aesthetics of zoom and color that characterize the photographs (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Zoom delirium, Haarlemmerplein, 2012.

In the case of the Haarlemmerplein construction site, slowness is achieved by means of photographic techniques and aesthetics that produce conflicting effects of familiarization and estrangement. What connects the Haarlemmerplein construction site photography with the nostalgic archival photographs of the Kinkerbuurt is that both projects create slowness not only by placing art in public spaces and thereby decelerating pedestrian and traffic flows through the demands placed on the attention of passersby, but also and more significantly by distracting from urban architectural transformation and the larger spatial reordering of the global city to which that transformation belongs.

In both cases, slowness results from masking mobility. This effect follows from a strategy of redirecting visual attention, effectively exploiting the medium of photography’s potential to create alternative imaginaries of place on the spot. While the Kinkerbuurt photographs simulate a time shift, evoking a dreamy 19th-century urban neighborhood (including associations with slowness and social cohesion that are conjured up by this imaginary), the Haarlemmerplein project reroutes the attention of passersby to the interior spaces of the surrounding neighborhood. Both art projects employ visual culture as a means of creatively cushioning the reality of rapid—and often highly generic—urban restructuring.

As these examples reveal, slow art at construction sites—ranging from gritty historical images of urban serenity to the design delirium of contemporary domestic interiors—is being deployed by developers, city councils, community organizations, and often the artists themselves, to counter—while also contributing to—the accelerated flows of globalization. As such, these spaces are marked by aesthetic interruptions which at one level serve to decelerate the flows of the global city, yet at another level paradoxically form part of those flows.

To understand this dynamic more fully, it helps to turn to Ackbar Abbas and to recalibrate his concept of disappearance and the politics of place, developed in the 1990s in relation to postcolonial Hong Kong, in which, as he explains, “disappearance is not a matter of effacement but of replacement and substitution, where the perceived danger is re-contained through representations that are familiar and plausible” (Abbas, 1997, p. 8). In the Amsterdam construction sites discussed here, a related form of disappearance can be identified, in the sense that there is similarly a dynamic of concealment, distortion, and misrecognition at work in these transient city spaces. It is one that not only draws on but also reframes memory and a sense of neighborhood in relation to the fast-paced developmental imperatives of the global city and the neoliberal now.

So although these urban construction sites work somewhat differently than the postcolonial sites of disappearance that Abbas (1997) identifies in Hong Kong’s culture of speed and flash, they nonetheless emerge in a similar way as places of contradiction, contest, and ambivalence. In the case of Amsterdam, these spaces of rapid transformation become sites for the negotiation of a tension running throughout the city: a tension between the desire to reground cultural heritage and the pressure to build an amnesiac global future. It is this tension that connects what is happening in Amsterdam to other rapidly globalizing cities worldwide, where the transformative effects of globalization, including the speed and scope of change, are recurring sources of both cultural energy and anxiety (Lindner, 2010).

What is especially notable about the Haarlemmerplein photography project is that, by combining an aesthetic of neighborhood interiors with the voyeuristic promise to reveal strange sensations, the images cater to a desire for both homeliness and, simultaneously, curiosity for newness. Thus, the project combines the desire for place as familiar retreat with the marketing of place as a form of spectacle. In this way, the project confirms Peck’s (2011) thesis of the creative commodification of place as an event within the recreative city. What is more, in its presentation of place as something familiar yet unknown, the Haarlemmerplein project also shares a key characteristic with our next case study.

Street View

Shifting the focus from construction space to community space, our final case study is a 2012 community art project called “Street View”. Like the Piet-Hein construction site discussed above, it comes from Amsterdam’s Kinkerbuurt neighborhood, a former working-class district dating back to the 19th century, which has been transformed in the past 50 years into a vibrant and highly multicultural neighborhood, accommodating increasing numbers of immigrants from across Morocco, Turkey, West Africa, Surinam, Indonesia, and, in a recent wave of gentrification, young middle-class Dutch families and the expatriated elite of the global corporate diaspora.

In other words, the Kinkerbuurt is a highly cosmopolitan, economically diverse, and transnational neighborhood that is continually being transformed and reinvented, and where many of the trends and tensions of globalization—especially in relation to labor and migration—converge. At the same time, it is also a neighborhood whose historical identity has long been in crisis and where local authorities have been struggling to accommodate the complex range of cultural ties and lifestyle choices of its inhabitants.

One response has seen the local city council fund a number of community art initiatives, with the aim of encouraging public discussion and interaction, as well as experimentation with creative ownership over public space. “Street View” is one such project. Organized by a local neighborhood foundation—the Stichting Bellamybuurt—with support from Amsterdam West city council, the project temporarily transforms private household windows into showcases displaying works by students of the Amsterdam Photography Academy (Figure 7). What all the exhibited works have in common is that they depict everyday scenes from cities around the world, including Consuegra (Spain), Leiden (the Netherlands), London (United Kingdom), Mechelen (The Netherlands), Naples (Italy), Nazca (Peru), New York (United States), and Rome (Italy). As this list reveals, not all the selected cities rank among the largest, most popular, or even most recognizable global cities worldwide. Rather, the locations reflect the eclectic and unpredictable urban connections that exist between the artists, their homelands, and their sites of travel.

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Figure 7.

Street View: Residential window showcases, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

The residential window showcases are organized around a preplanned route, which means that viewers are invited to use an associated map and walk through the neighborhood in order to find all 14 of the artworks belonging to the exhibition. The project’s title—“Street View”—thus acquires a double meaning. It invites residents and visitors alike to look at a diverse set of global street photographs from other cities while simultaneously exploring the actual streets of Amsterdam’s Kinkerbuurt neighborhood. This interrelation is strengthened by the fact that, in bright daylight, the showcases’ window panes mirror the artworks’ immediate environment (Figure 8). These ghostly reflections of Amsterdam streets, cars, buildings, and people in the window panes reinforce the impression that the exhibition forms an extension of Amsterdam’s everyday streetscape. What is more, such visual interferences further slow down viewers’ interaction with the artworks, as they work to distinguish between photograph and reflection.

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Figure 8.

Street View: Reflection of Amsterdam in photograph, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

All the displayed works play on photography’s capacity to still movement and time—an aspect of the medium that Chitra Ramalingam (2010) describes in relation to early 19th-century photography as the ability to “fix transience” by converting “the spatio-temporal complexity of a dynamic event into a static, spatial, two-dimensional representation” (p. 21). Often, these moments of fixed transience are quite ordinary: children playing in the street, an old man riding alone in the metro, an elderly couple sitting together at a table inside their home. These photographs do not focus on the intense or dramatic moments of everyday life in the city. Rather, they still activities that imply slowness—activities that do not directly belong to global-urban circuits of fast labor, business, and commodity exchange. Most of the activities portrayed in the photographs belong instead to the categories of walking, waiting, watching, or leisure. The remaining photographs show depopulated spaces such as an inner-city garden in New York or isolated objects on Dutch sidewalks (Figure 9).

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Figure 9.

Street View: Lonely objects, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

Thus, in addition to the slowness that follows from the artworks’ invitation to stop and look, the “Street View” project also produces slowness at the level of content. Many of the photographs show situations of inertia that form constitutive parts of different urban traffic flows. For instance, there is a photograph of a man sitting alone in a metro in Rome, waiting for his destination to get off the train. He is forced to stop and linger while his body, enclosed in the metro cabin, is rapidly moved through the city. Two other photographs, jointly titled “Honk and Keep on Laughing” (Toeter en blijf lachen), depict traffic jams in the streets of Naples. Here, the representation of immobility reveals momentary pauses, stoppages, and breaks that are an inescapable part of the reality of urban traffic flows.

In fact, these last two “Street View” works highlight how slowness can constitute a precondition of urban mobility, conforming with what Bissel and Fuller (2011) describe as “container agency,” which “is best exemplified in the figure of the passenger”:

a figure carried away by the mobilization of mobility and stillness. Located at the nexus of mobility and immobility, “freedom” and control, flesh and machine, it is hardly surprising that many of the most pressing and highly contested issues around governance and power literally bear down on the passenger: a figure produced through mass-mobilization. As the axiomatic figure of contemporary mobile life, the passenger prompts some disquieting questions about the agentive potentialities of stillness in its multiplicity. (p. 8)

The picture of the Rome metro described above emphasizes how the mobility of transport involves the need to stop and integrate into predesigned waiting spaces, such as the car or the various vehicles of public transport. All these containers offer mobility provided that passengers follow certain rules, such as traffic rules or distinct security measures.

Bissel and Fuller’s argument that container agency operates between “freedom and control, flesh and machine” draws on the assumption that the submission to these “protocol machines that operate through the gate-logics of measurement, calibration and sequencing” (Bissel & Fuller, 2011, p. 9) does not only require stopping physically but also limits mobility in terms of freedom of choice. The issue at stake, which the “Street View” photographs raise but do not resolve, is whether mobility and slowness can really be conceptualized as mutually opposed phenomena and, if not, how both are materially and socially related.

In addition to emphasizing the moments of inertia that mobile traffic entails, several “Street View” photographs portray urban subjects who are commonly understood to be excluded from the fast flows of globalization. According to Parkins (2004), “the unemployed, children, the elderly and women at home comprise a significant section” (p. 367) of this group. However, as a critical comment on this enumeration, Parkins asks via Kate Shaw (2001, as cited in Parkins, 2004), which activities actually count as fast or slow:

Do the activities of the private sphere, for instance the care of children, count as fast or slow? Characterizations of private life as “slow” may derive from the fact that family time is, as Shaw (2001) argues, still associated with a notion of more “natural” or “pre-industrial” time: “Like pre-industrial time, family time is widely believed to be qualitatively different to work time . . . [it] is essentially anti-linear and opposed to work time, which is linear and progressive.” (Parkins, 2004, p. 367)

Some of the “Street View” photographs make visible this tension between fast and slow by showing so-called “immobile” groups in deliberately mobile postures. One example is a work composed of three different photographs that show the legs of what appear to be an elderly woman, a young girl, and an elderly man using a walking stick (Figure 10). The photographs appear to be snapshots capturing the movement of walking. Consequently, the artwork depicts the mobility of three representatives of demographic groups often assumed to be slow, immobile, or demobilized. Interestingly, the photograph is positioned next to the “Honk and Keep on Laughing” traffic jam images—a contrast that at least weakens the stereotypes of mobility and immobility that are commonly attached to certain social groups and modes of locomotion, such as driving versus walking.

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Figure 10.

Street View: Slow walking, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

By contrast, other photographs in the “Street View” series explicitly portray moments of physical slowness, such as an elderly couple hunched over a table (Figure 11), or a woman with a headscarf who seems to be standing still on a sidewalk and statically observing her surrounding neighborhood. Consequently, the project draws an ambivalent picture of mobility in the urban context. What is distinctive about the “Street View” project is that it addresses this subject in relation to different urban locations worldwide. As Helen Liggett (2003) points out, “photography can be deployed to make connections to aspects of city life that are visible, fleeting, and not ordinarily noted” (p. 119). But instead of referring to its own geographical neighborhood—the Kinkerbuurt—“Street View” establishes such connections by highlighting the similarities that mark what we might call a global struggle of mobility and immobility under the conditions of neoliberal urbanization.

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Figure 11.

Street View: Elderly couple crouching, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

Insofar as the project is concerned with registering and making visible this struggle, “Street View” actually ties in with the slow movement’s agenda of “consciously negotiating the different temporalities which make up our everyday lives” (Parkins, 2004, p. 363). In doing so, it places emphasis on the different ways in which this struggle is experienced—thus highlighting the plurality and heterogeneity of the global mobility/immobility struggle, while at the same time underlining how this struggle might constitute a unifying experience, felt in diverse modes and various intensities in different places around the world.

The “Street View” photographs thus produce representations of urban street life that elude the conceptual dichotomy of mobility/immobility by presenting a more nuanced image of urban reality—an image that breaks with stereotypes labeling certain activities, spaces, or social groups as either mobile or immobile. Instead, the photographs emphasize how urban movement and stasis do not mutually exclude each other but, on the contrary, often implicate and presuppose each other, such as in the case of the lone subway passenger who sits still while moving. Employing photography’s potential to capture experience and represent it in an interpretative fashion (Sontag, 1973/2005, pp. 2-4), the images make visible the ways in which, for most inhabitants, the lived experience of the city often lies somewhere in-between movement and stasis. It is a sensitivity to this liminal condition that connects the “Street View” photographs to the slow movement’s general aim of readdressing the uneven, varied temporalities of everyday life in the era of globalization.

Urban Farming

In a coincidental yet meaningful twist, the “Street View” project connects to urban slow practice in another way entirely. One of the last artworks on the walking route of the exhibition is a photograph of the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, one of the world’s largest rooftop vegetable gardens (at over 6,000 square feet) and a prominent international symbol of slow practice in the urban farming movement (Figure 12). The foreground of the photograph shows the lush, green growth of the farm’s vegetable plantings, while the background is filled by the iconic skyline of Manhattan. The resonances and contrasts between the colors and shapes of both the natural and urban worlds, as well as the strange cohabitation of the two in the same photographic composition, are key components of this image and its treatment of the return of nature to the heart of the city.

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Figure 12.

Street View: Urban farming in New York City, Kinkerbuurt, 2012.

The photograph’s inclusion in an exhibition devoted to the urban quotidian registers the extent to which the slow practice of urban farming has become a common sight in neighborhoods worldwide, particularly as part of community-based urban renewal initiatives. Indeed, from its marginal, countercultural origins, urban farming has grown into a widely accepted and increasingly popular and portable approach to revivifying “dead” urban spaces in cities ranging from Havana to Baltimore to Manila. These days, urban farming is not only supported by city councils and community groups in urban locations worldwide (Hanson & Marty, 2012; McClintock, 2010), but has also been integrated into the core of design thinking about the future of smart and sustainable cities, as C. J. Lim beautifully illustrates in his case studies of ecological-urban symbiosis (Figure 13; Lim & Liu, 2010).

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Figure 13.

Urban farming/computing: Design for Guangming Smart City, 2007.

It is therefore interesting that the photograph of New York’s Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is displayed in a location adjacent to one of Amsterdam’s own urban farming experiments, a large and contested open space known as the Bellamytuin (Figure 14). Sandwiched between a busy canal and a disused tram depot (itself a site of creative experimentation with public use), the Bellamytuin is the location of the former city council headquarters for the Oud West (Old West) district of Amsterdam. The building was demolished in 2010 as part of the amalgamation of Oud West into the new municipal superdistrict of Amsterdam West. Since then, a lengthy and heated public debate has ensued over the future use of the land. While the debate continues, local community organizations have temporarily appropriated the space with the backing of the city council, transforming it from an abandoned construction site into what could be described as a pop-up park. Rolls of turf have been laid, makeshift benches and garbage cans have been installed, fences have been retro-fitted with gates, and, perhaps most significantly, a large number of urban farm-pods have been spread across the space.

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Figure 14.

Bellamytuin: urban farm-pods, 2012.

The organization behind the pods and much of the clean-up operation is Stadsboeren (City-Farmers), a nonprofit volunteer-based urban farming collective, which, supported by the city council, local art foundations, and select corporate sponsors, programs various kinds of events and activities at the site in addition to the farming itself, including community picnics, organic growing clinics, school educational visits, and an urban farming festival. As outlined on its website, the group’s approach to curating this space is informed by an ethic of slowness taken from the global organic food and urban farming movements (Stadsboeren, 2012). In particular, Stadsboeren is focused on drawing community members into the space of the Bellamytuin to promote greener living through slow practice.

The links between urban creativity policy and slow-practice initiatives like Stadsboeren are sufficiently complex to be the subject of an article in their own right. The point we wish to stress here, however, is the juxtaposition of slow art and slow practice, and the ways in which this spatial proximity—between a photograph of urban farming and a site of urban farming—reveals a convergence of aesthetic form and spatial practice in the shared critique of accelerated living. Such proximity also establishes another point of transnational connection and exchange between Amsterdam and other sites of creative urbanism.

Slow Flow

In closing, it is worth highlighting that there are some significant parallels between the “Piet Hein” and Haarlemmerplein construction sites and the Kinkerbuurt “Street View” project. All three are concerned with the potential for spatial and social estrangement in the globalizing city’s “new spatial order” (Marcuse & Van Kempen, 2000, p. 3). More important, all three are aesthetically designed to produce deceleratory urban experiences, which encourage pause and reflection, maybe even detour and delay, and which constitute responses to the lived experience of globalization.

Even so, there are also some very important differences between the projects. One crucial difference is that the construction site photos are designed to screen urban change and distract from the neighborhood’s homogenization by evoking precisely the conditions of community and heterogeneity that are disappearing, partly because of developments like the construction projects themselves and the generic urbanism to which they belong. This is a dynamic linked to the kind of gentrification Sharon Zukin (2010) writes about in The Naked City, where she identifies how the consumer delirium of contemporary urban living is eroding the authenticity of place, creating more and more spaces that possess the appearance, but not the substance, of neighborhood and community. Zukin’s focus is on New York, but the trend is happening everywhere, including Amsterdam, as Zukin herself has noted in her analysis of the city’s upscale Utrechtsestraat shopping area (Zukin, 2011).

The issue can be reframed in Jamie Peck’s terms by suggesting that the construction site photos belong to what he calls the “viral geography of creativity” (Peck, 2011, p. 481), by which he is referring to the vehicularity of urban creativity and the ways in which the idea of urban creativity is being feverishly adopted in regeneration policies across cities worldwide. The effect is to reduce individual sites of creative endeavor, such as the construction site photos we have discussed, to just another generic node in a global network of creative urbanism, what Peck describes as “no more than another event space in the sphere of circulating images and investments” (Peck, 2011, p. 482).

By contrast, the “Street View” project in the Kinkerbuurt does something slightly different, even if it does ultimately connect to the same broader dynamic of gentrification, creativity, and renewal, contributing to Amsterdam’s increasingly branded profile as a creative city. Rather than using slow art to distort or screen urban change, “Street View” uses slow art to make that change newly visible. Specifically, it does so by revealing the transformative ties between the neighborhood community and the mobile, migrant experiences of globalization, which can be seen in the images as well as experienced through the exhibition’s perambulatory viewing conditions and the spaces, streets, and windows through which it guides the public. Crucial here is that the project does this not in order to join or exploit the neoliberal hype of creative urbanism (although it forms part of the background noise of that hype), but rather to generate an alternative, decelerated flow of art and people within the global city, focused on the transnational possibilities and resonances of contemporary urban citizenship.

Most of all, however, “Street View” illustrates the overall argument running through this article’s analysis of slow art in the creative city. As we demonstrate in relation to urban renewal initiatives in Amsterdam, slowness and creativity are deeply implicated in contemporary transformations of urban social space. While creativity has long been a focus of scholarly work on globalization and cities, slowness (like related concepts such as inertia, stillness, and immobility) has only begun to attract serious critical attention relatively recently, and its interrelations with creative urbanism remain underexamined. Yet as our examples of slow art illustrate, slowness can be strategically employed to interrupt the accelerated urbanism of globalization and open up new creative spaces in which to explore issues of place, community, and belonging. The fact that slowness can also be appropriated or deployed by the creativity syndrome in contemporary urbanism does not diminish its significance. Rather, such complications point to the critical potential of slowness—in its multiple valences, articulations, and practices—to operate both against and within the accelerated flows of the global city.