Making resilience: everyday affect and global affiliation in Australian Slow Cities

Introduction

The concept of resilience is rapidly becoming a key category across policy literatures in the very contexts where human geographers often work – that is in towns, cities and rural areas where the relationship between people and the environment is for some reason a topic of interest. In the human geography literature it has been suggested that there has been a ‘social turn’ for the concept, ¹ raising both enthusiasm for its applicability ² and concerns about its implications. ³ In this article, taking the narratives represented to us by leaders of the Australian member-towns of the Cittaslow (Slow City) movement as an example, we propose a re-thinking and claiming of the concept of resilience. We approach this by examining how local forms of resilience may be understood as emergent from their entanglements with global and regional flows. We argue that human geography has a role to play in this debate precisely because it offers a way to frame resilience as processual, affective and as part of place.

Our analysis is framed by theories of place as open and ongoing. We understand Cittaslow towns as localities that are embedded in emergent, processual, relational and contingent entanglements with a range of other constituents of place. Drawing on the work of scholars including Massey, ⁴ Amin ⁵ and Ingold ⁶ we emphasize the relationalities that constitute place and what Massey calls ‘place beyond place’.^7,8 Our argument also builds on Pink’s earlier conceptualization of the Cittaslow movement as making ‘alternatives’ through ‘indirect activism’ rather than direct action campaigns, ⁹ Lewis’ work on everyday forms of lifestyle and consumer-based activism^10,11,12 and Pink and Servon’s focus ¹³ on the role of local-global intersections in making of the qualities that characterize Cittaslow towns. In doing so we critically depart from studies that define Cittaslow through practices of local resistance, alternative temporalities,^14,15anti-globalization and reactive deceleration; ¹⁶ as Ash Amin has argued ‘the very terminology of territorial scales and boundaries, caught up in oppositions of place and space, proximity and distance, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, scaling and rescaling, is challenged by globalisation’. ¹⁷ However, in order to advance the discussion of the implications of Cittaslow activism for planning and policy, we engage a further concept that is increasingly influential in current debates about human practical activity and our capacity to confront environmental and economic challenges – the idea of making as applied in design anthropology ¹⁸ – and discuss this in relation to the concept of resilience as adapted to discussions of planning. ¹⁹ We argue that through a notion of resilience as emergent – in the making – we can re-think how forms of indirect activism become ‘active’ in the world, beyond the binaries associated with theories of resistance.

The Slow movement provides an ideal example for thinking through multi-scalar relations of place and the forging of practical and material elements of resilience. On the one hand the philosophy of slow is embedded in the French concept of terroir ²⁰ as elaborated by Carlo Petrini the leader of Slow Food.^21,22,23 Slowness is thus literally rooted in local soil through the insistence on local produce and connection to land, ²⁴ Simultaneously the Slow movement inhabits a domain extended beyond particular localities where global and local, digital and material, flows of people, things, capital, power, resources, discourse, and forms of activism become mutually interwoven in complex and changing ecologies of place. The Cittaslow principles and framework are moreover flexibly interpreted and applied across its national and local manifestations. ²⁵ Thus offering an example that accounts for the relationality of local uniqueness and that invites an interrogation of how the relationships between local groups and global movements are forged, conceptualized, crafted, interwoven and traversed. Indeed, in Australia, Cittaslow town leaders have engaged the global movement’s framework as an enabling technology that is appropriated through specifically local narratives of specialness. Through this, they become involved in imagining, proposing, creating and experiencing positive futures for their towns and villages. Here we focus in on the processes and narratives through which town leaders enacted and described such activities, experiences and meanings to us. To conclude, we explore the implications of these examples for understanding how resilient localities are produced through and at the local/global intersection, and the insights this offers for planning for local wellbeing and resilience.

Conceptualizing slow

The Slow movement emerged in 1986, from what is described as a moment of protest:

Carlo Petrini decided to resist the steady march of fast food and all that it represents when he organized a protest against the building of a McDonalds near the Spanish steps in Rome. Armed with bowls of Penne, Petrini and his supporters spawned a phenomenon. Three years later Petrini founded the International Slow Food Movement renouncing not only fast food but also the overall pace of ‘fast life’. ²⁶

Petrini was not alone in his search for an alternative to fast food in what some would interpret as an increasingly fast living culture. Slow Food is now a large-scale and influential global movement with ‘over 100,000 members joined in 1500 convivia – [or] local chapters – worldwide, as well as a network of 2000 food communities who practice small-scale and sustainable production of quality foods’. ²⁷ Formed in 1989, the Slow Food agenda resonated with emergent concerns in both the public sphere ²⁸ and academic thought about the demise of traditional culture and society and the need to live differently, as did the Cittaslow movement established in 1999, by a group of Italian Mayors who with Petrini sought to apply Slow Food’s principles to urban life in settlements with populations of under 50,000. Cittaslow towns work towards (and must already be shown to be committed to) a broad sustainability agenda, articulated through almost 60 criteria divided between environmental and infrastructure policies, the quality of the urban fabric, encouraging local produce, hospitality, and community, and creation of Cittaslow awareness. The Cittaslow framework is not suitable for all towns, contexts or purposes, ²⁹ and to join, towns must score over 50 percent in a self-evaluation against the criteria. Yet from 1999 to the time of our research in 2013, Cittaslow continued growing, to 174 member towns in 27 countries. ³⁰

In the latter part of the 20th century phenomena like Slow Food and Slow Cities would have easily appeared to have analytical resonance with the prospect of resistance to theoretical visions of a ‘juggernaut’ of modernity, ³¹ loss of social ties, and fragmentation of identity in the wake of digital media. ³² Such broad brushstroke theoretical narratives have a tempting explanatory power for the Slow movement’s ambitions to maintain forms of face-to-face sociality (e.g. the convivial meal) and local ties (e.g. the relationship to the land and its produce). Likewise recent interpretations of the Slow movement by scholars such as John Tomlinson ³³ that locate Slowness within a reactive strain of deceleration within a wider process of a speeded-up culture and society tempt us to put Slow into relief against a force of fastness. Yet as Pink and Servon ³⁴ argue, these arguments do not coincide with the findings of ethnographic research in Spanish or UK slow cities. Existing research indicates that local Cittaslow leaders are less concerned with the actual speed of life than with maintaining and protecting the quality and uniqueness of their specific, existing ways of living.^35,36

Understanding the Slow movement as simply as symptom or effect of a sociological or societal trend moreover undermines any potential analysis of the transformative potential of the movement as a grassroots phenomenon. ³⁷ Thus although we concur that global, national and regional scales of societal trends, politics, flows of capital and the like are inextricably interwoven with the processes from which local configurations emerge we stress that these need to be understood in relation to the specific. The adoption of the Cittaslow principles and framework is always embedded in and interwoven with the ways in which townspeople experience being, knowing and doing everydayness in their homes, streets and public spaces, and is thus inevitably tied to specific local conditions and contexts. This resonates with what Featherstone et al refer to as ‘progressive localism’, which involves ‘community strategies that are outward-looking and that create positive affinities between places and social groups negotiating global processes’. ³⁸ Therefore the international uptake of the Cittaslow framework needs to be understood and theorized through ethnographic attention to what it is like to be involved with the making, maintaining and living of Cittaslow principles in and through specific experiences of place. This focus on negotiating general principles via specificity likewise generates Cittaslow’s potential for transformation and as we suggest, below for making resilience.

While theoretical narratives of speed and deceleration are poorly equipped to account for the empirical specificities of the Slow movement and its relation to distinct localities and experiences, certain processes of modernity through the 1990s to the current decade, have undeniably influenced shaping the movement. The anti-McDonalds protest at the Spanish steps is a frequently cited moment in the Slow movement’s history and has many parallels in UK Slow City leaders’ descriptions of their sentiments about large supermarket chains and other global outlets. ³⁹ Similarly concerns about the encroachment of global retailers on specific localities have featured in the emergence of the Slow movement in Australia. Before focusing in on questions of resilience we outline by way of example, how a specific protest was integral to the emergence of one Cittaslow group, in Australia’s Dandenong Ranges.

In 2012, 27 years after Petrini’s initial protest, a battle against McDonalds grew up in rural Victoria, Australia. As Claire Ferres Miles described it in the Australian Hillscene Magazine:

The battle to protect our beloved green hills against the red and yellow monolith started in early 2011 when McDonalds lodged a planning application to build a fast food outlet in Tecoma. Over 1,100 individual community objections were lodged opposing the proposal – the largest response to a planning application ever seen in the Shire of Yarra Ranges. ⁴⁰

In March 2013, on a warm spring day, we walked through Tecoma, a small town with a population of 2085, 40 kms east of Melbourne in the Dandenong ranges, alongside what protest organizers claimed were over 3000 people. ⁴¹ Ordinary people took to the streets, unfurling banners, and holding up signs to protest against the impending establishment of a McDonald’s restaurant and drive-through in the town, opposite the primary school, and potentially in competition with local independent traders. In the last two years McDonalds, despite the persistence of the Burger Off campaigners, had gained planning permission to build in Tecoma. In planning meetings of the Cittaslow Dandenong Ranges Group, who at the time were in the early phases of applying for Cittaslow accreditation, discussions of this crisis always generated an affective stance through which participants recounted their frustration and disappointment that Victoria’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT, the state government agency for dealing with disputes over retail tenancy) had approved the McDonald’s site after the Yarra Ranges Council, in response to strong local opposition, last year refused its application. Like many local residents (a household survey found 88% of the Tecoma population opposed the development ⁴² ), they saw McDonald’s fast food ethos as clashing with the very reasons they wanted to live in the area. They feared a drive-through food outlet might impact on the livelihood of local traders, their children’s health, litter in the surrounding environment, traffic and street safety, and the aesthetic of the town.

Support for the protest grew with the campaign gaining national and global coverage including by CNN. ⁴³ A website (www.burgeroff.org), facebook campaign and videos supported what No Maccas in the Hills spokesperson Garry Muratore (previously the long term marketing manager for Agfa Australasia) described as a highly ‘technology connected community’, ⁴⁴ which linked the local and global digital materialities of protest. With its material culture of T-shirts, badges and posters, the campaign developed its own icons (some of which parodied McDonald’s own brand strategies), music and the widely distributed video – Tecoma Gnomes’ Call to March – featuring a group of garden gnomes collecting up litter from McDonalds from their forest, who collectively decide to join the humans at their anti-Maccas rally. At the rally the gnomes were individually auctioned to raise money to support the campaign. In common with UK Cittaslow events, ⁴⁵ locally produced food, artefacts and sensations were on sale including vegeburgers, and the CD Resistance is Fertile – No McDonald’s in Tecoma with songs by Hill’s musicians including Cath Russell, from the Dandenong Cittaslow group. After the rally, the No Maccas campaigners organized a meeting between six delegates and McDonald’s management in Melbourne in April 2013 to discuss their and other local concerns relating to the proposed development ⁴⁶ which was represented as a unique achievement, as Garry Muratore put it: ‘The Tecoma project is undoubtedly the most contentious development ever for McDonalds’ Australian operation. It is our belief that this is the first time McDonald’s have met face to face with a protest group’.

The No Macca’s campaign created a powerful affective environment that inspired the Dandenong Ranges Cittaslow planning group. Yet the Cittaslow group were careful to distinguish themselves from the No Macca’s campaign. Significantly, while supportive of the campaign’s cause, they emphasized to us that the Cittaslow group was created precisely as a positive, constructive and therapeutic alternative to protesting against something. As for other Australian Slow Cities, who had struggled with different forces, including bush fire devastation and drought, membership of the movement created a different way forward in the face of a threat to the local. It meant that they felt their energies were directed not simply to practices of opposition or resistance but to building alternatives. As these alternatives were shaped, the specificity of the experience of the local and the frames brought by the global movement became entangled. One evening we sat around our host’s dining room table at the Dandenong Ranges Cittaslow planning meeting contemplating together the list of over 60 criteria which form part of the quite extensive accreditation process, to determine how and where to start to make the connections through which they could articulate ‘what we are’ into the Cittaslow framework. While seeking a fit between locality and the criteria, the discussion turned to the group’s biographical and everyday sensory, embodied and affective experiences of the area. Participants recounted how when you arrive in the Dandenongs the first thing you see and smell is the forest, and that at night you can see the stars through the car windows. Some remembered how when they were younger they used to be able to smell the gum trees and one participant recalled how her mother would always tell them to wind down the car windows as they arrived to appreciate this – an experience now becoming rare as the trees were increasingly felled. They emphasized the importance of the feeling of living in the Dandenongs, the way it ‘gets into your blood’, that they knew it was a unique place to live, the importance of being able to express what this means to them, to be able to celebrate that feeling and to be able to ‘conserve and protect’ what they have.

In the next section we call on the concepts of making and resilience to propose a new way to understand these Cittaslow entanglements.

Making and resilience: or beyond resistance

The anthropologist Tim Ingold has recently brought our attention to the concept of ‘making’. While Ingold focuses on the making of objects – the conventional focus of design – his reflections offer a novel way to consider how the design and making of everyday forms of activism is balanced between an imagined future and the actual resources that are available. Ingold writes:

Human endeavours, it seems, are forever poised between catching dreams and coaxing materials. In this tension, between the pull of hopes and dreams and the drag of material constraint, and not in any opposition between cognitive intellection and mechanical execution, lies the relation between design and making. It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived. ⁴⁷

This invites us to think of the ‘making’ of Cittaslow towns as happening similarly at the nexus between the imaginative and the practical and in lived everyday environments. This, we suggest, has significant implications for how we might comprehend the ‘making’ of resilience.

As we have noted, the concept of resilience has gained traction in urban policy and academic debates internationally. Likewise, in policy circles there is a growing emphasis on resilient communities as sources of and models for social cohesion and sustainability. In Australia policy researchers have shown interest in sustainability, adaptation and resilience in Australian towns and rural areas faced by the challenges of climate change, drought and bushfires as well as significant socio-economic shifts in the function and role of rural communities.^48,49 Yet, while some researchers have explored the potential of an anthropological ‘community study’ approach to resilience, ⁵⁰ there are few in depth anthropological studies of small towns in Australia ⁵¹ to inform this agenda. Indeed while the concept of resilience has gained currency in the humanities and the social sciences its theoretical roots can be variously found in developmental economics ⁵² and ecological research ⁵³ creating challenges associated with the transferral of concepts across disciplines. Such challenges have led Danny MacKinnon and Kate Driscoll Derickson to reject the use of the concept of resilience, in favour of ‘resourcefulness’. Voicing concerns about the adoption of resilience amongst social scientists and community activists they warn that ‘Convergence of thinking around the notion of resilience is resulting in the evacuation of the political’. ⁵⁴ However as Katrina Brown points out there are multiple and contesting voices around the concept of resilience ⁵⁵ which might be considered to be still emergent in terms of its definition, use and engagement for transformation. Given the attention the concept is already receiving, an alternative approach is thus to claim and rework a notion of resilience in ways that re-insert the political, through an engagement with a politics of place.

Environmental policy and planning scholar Simin Davoudi has usefully sought to appropriate ecological conceptions of resilience for planning, connecting these science-based models with relational and processual approaches to space (and time) drawn from cultural and social geography. ⁵⁶ Noting the synergies between these approaches, Davoudi outlines how: ‘Evolutionary resilience [can be seen to promote] the understanding of places not as units of analysis or neutral containers, but as complex, interconnected socio-spatial systems with extensive and unpredictable feedback processes which operate at multiple scales and timeframes’. ⁵⁷ She argues that this ‘resonates strongly with the relational understanding of spatiality’, which for geographers like Doreen Massey is ‘defined by “simultaneity of multiple trajectories” (Massey, 2005, p. 61)’. ⁵⁸ Further she reminds us that ‘In the social world, resilience has as much to do with shaping the challenges we face as responding to them’. ⁵⁹

Where for Davoudi it is in these negotiations that planners have a capacity to act on the world, for Ingold action should not be understood as the effect of agency, but rather, putting it the other way round, he argues that ‘only in the retrospective reconstruction of action already undertaken – in tracing it back to a putative point of origin – can we derive the agency that is supposed to have given rise to it’. ⁶⁰ Notwithstanding this divergence of thought, the utility of bringing together Davoudi’s ⁶¹ understanding of resilience as an emergent, dialogic process of place with Ingold’s notion of making, ⁶² is to understand Slow City activists as generating designs for imagined ways of being and living in ways that are relational to local and global ecologies of place. If we take seriously Ingold’s reworking of the sequence in which agency emerges, the idea of everyday life as a site for resistance and appropriation, as developed for instance by Michel de Certeau, ⁶³ which conversely directs us to analyse people’s agency to work as against structures and representatives of power, becomes redundant. Therefore whereas the Slow movement has, in existing accounts, been characterized as offering alternative ways of being, feeling and living that represent a distinctive form of resistance to the encroachment of corporate capitalist forms of modernity and globalization, ⁶⁴ and indeed, Cittaslow leaders often depict their towns as epitomizing the antithesis of certain elements of globalization,^65,66 we suggest a different interpretation. Amongst other things, the leaders of the Cittaslow movement’s member towns promote ways of life that contest the values and products of hamburger chains, global agri-business and the like by going beyond the rhetoric and practices of direct action campaigns.^67,68,69 Instead, through the movement’s principles and criteria, which outline a framework for sustainable urban development and quality of life,^70,71,72 they focus on an everyday urbanism whereby living in a particular locality is tied to the making, maintaining and experiencing of everyday sensory pleasures and is productive of forms of wellbeing and, we will suggest, a form of resilience which enables them to co-exist with forces that are not consistent with their principles.

We next discuss how Cittaslow local leaders in Australia imagine and design material, experiential and practical elements of their towns through the Cittaslow framework. This form of making, we interpret as part of an encounter with place, in order to advance a perspective on how we can understand resilience (both as lived and as a representational category) to be an emergent quality and a potential outcome of a way of engaging with an environment and the relationships that compose it, rather than a process that can be done to a town.

Researching an adaptive framework

To engage with Cittaslow leaders in Australia, we adapted a sensory ethnography approach, developed when researching in UK and Spanish Slow Cities.^73,74,75 We were particularly interested in how participants reference environmental, sensory and affective elements of locality through claims of, and practical activity relating to, specialness. To attend to these often unspoken elements of place we followed their lead, using the ways of engaging and recording most appropriate to each situation. This included sharing locally made food and drinks, conversations, walks and tours with Cittaslow leaders, and therefore effectively being guided through and ‘shown’ the experiential elements of Cittaslow identity. With the Dandenong Ranges group introduced above, who were developing their membership application during our research, we also attended and followed planning meetings held in Cittaslow leaders’ homes, as participant observers, taking extensive written notes. We undertook informal interviews over meals and coffees, where we have taken extensive notes, as well as detailed audio-recorded in-depth interviews with participants who established and lead the three existing Australian Cittaslow towns.

The first urban settlement in Australia to gain Cittaslow status was Goolwa in South Australia, ⁷⁶ followed by Katoomba Blue Mountains, in New South Wales, ⁷⁷ and Yea in Victoria. ⁷⁸ The Dandenong Ranges group, introduced above, in dialogue with the leaders of these towns was actively working towards accreditation during our research. Like other national networks, ⁷⁹ Cittaslow Australasia has, with approval from the International Head Quarters, locally interpreted the movement’s criteria. Notably, in Australia while food cultures remain important, Cittaslow towns are not required to have Slow Food groups, and Edward Booth, one of the founders and leaders of Cittaslow Goolwa explained, by way of the example of traffic and parking, how some elements taken for granted in Italian towns simply did not translate to the specificity of the Australian context. He noted that whereas in the historic walled towns of Italy, space was an issue and out-of-town car-parking is a valid criteria for Cittaslow membership, in Goolwa this was inapplicable since: ‘If you can’t park your car on the doorstep of the chemist, you’ll write a letter to the council complaining, you know you can park anywhere, its not an issue’. Here the interweaving of the global movement with the local environment meant adapting the criteria to account for local specificity. However further to this the focus on local specificity in Cittaslow enables town leaders to engage directly with their sense of uniqueness. Indeed, claims to specialness and uniqueness are common in Cittaslow towns and internationally leaders elsewhere have cited their desire to maintain these qualities as a reason for seeking Cittaslow accreditation.^80,81 The Australian towns are no exception. For example, in Cittaslow Katoomba Blue Mountains there was a long tradition of perceiving the area as unique and ‘special’. For example, Nigel and Sue Bell, the local Cittaslow leaders shared with us a set of hand-illustrated planning guidelines produced by the local Council in 1990, which stated that ‘The Blue Mountains has long been regarded as a special place – from times of it being an aboriginal meeting ground through to a contemporary tourist destination’ ⁸² and the intention ‘to give development guidelines so as to ensure the “Mountains” remain a special place’. As Sue pointed out such references to the ‘unique’ qualities of the Blue Mountains as a place still resonate throughout current Council documents. ⁸³ We now reflect further on how ‘specialness’ was expressed and shown to us in the Australian towns.

Feeling special: making localities and creating resilience

The narratives Cittaslow leaders used to explain their decisions to seek membership consistently emphasized related themes of specialness and crisis. For example, when we met Edward from Goolwa at a lunch where he was advising the Dandenong Ranges Cittaslow application group, and in a later in-depth interview, he explained how Goolwa, a coastal town in South Australia had already possessed a distinct identity and strong community networks and volunteerism. Echoing the narratives of Cittaslow International, he characterized Cittaslow as being about a certain quality of life, and raising local awareness and consideration for what they already have. In Goolwa a crisis brought this to the fore. During 2008 and 2009 Goolwa suffered one of the worst droughts in Australian history reducing its river to little more than salty mudflats, transforming how people experienced the town. Edward described how ‘the walk along the river was an environmental hazard, you know there was this dust blowing around … our house faces the river and we were getting this acid dust blowing into our garden and that stings the eyes and I think its pretty unhealthy stuff’. His account of how a dog was found dead by the riverbank emphasized the feelings this generated, as he put it ‘dogs don’t normally die at the edge of the river … people were getting pretty twitchy’. The drought was also felt deeply economically, since not only did Goolwa have a visible tourist industry related to the river but, Edward explained, additionally the industries that served it, such as ‘mast makers, sail makers, stainless steel welders and aluminium people who are actually all working for the boating industry … the mechanics, the nautical electricians … start to go belly-up too, so things were looking pretty bad’.

In this context, driven by a need to acknowledge what was special about the town beyond the river, the Goolwa Cittaslow group emerged, led by Lyn Clarke and her husband, John, who Edward described respectively as an ‘inspiration’ and, ‘a tower of strength’. Amongst other things they focused on recovering a sense of what else mattered in the physical environment, in that ‘…something that people often forget, even people that live in Goolwa, not only are we on the river, we are on the sea too, we have an absolutely spectacularly beautiful beach, you can walk literally miles without retracing your step’. The Cittaslow identity of Goolwa moreover involves community activities including technology and food events. Goolwa’s experience of environmental crisis created a context for the group’s leaders to reflect on the town’s already existing resources and its future as part of a process of recovery, towards making a form of resilience to the impact of the drought, Cittaslow accreditation offered a generative frame through which to do this.

Cittaslow Yea, in Victoria, in common with Goolwa, was founded through a crisis, and in common with the Dandenong Ranges group its leaders shared a therapeutic narrative. Both Kath, in the Dandenongs and Adele Anderson, who led the Yea Cittaslow process are professional therapists, lending to their interpretations an additional nuance of recovery. For Adele the process of applying for Cittaslow accreditation, which had involved a series of meetings with key contributors to town activities had been ‘a voyage of discovery’ where she had learned much that she was not aware of about what was happening in the town, and summed up the experience by recalling how another member of the group had commented that ‘I feel like I’ve written a love letter to the town’. The affective dimension of the Cittaslow process was important to the Yea leaders – Adele Anderson, Adam Dennis and Bec Bowles. The process that had led up to their application had involved a series of events, culminating in the bushfires of 2009 that devastated much of the surrounding area, and whose material and affective scars remain in the landscape and local memory. Taking a recovery approach, from Adele’s perspective ‘it was about changing that narrative from the negative things and talking about what we really liked and what was positive. So for me it was that therapeutic idea of helping the community refocus after what had been quite a long period, not just the fires but the drought and the pipeline project’. Like other towns the process of Cittaslow had, Adam said given them ‘a framework to really look at the place, look at our own town, and say what is this and why does it work, and what are the good things about it, and identify some of these very unique flows of loyalities and information and authority to be and do … you know that was, Cittaslow really helped us to really genuinely appreciate this stuff’. One of their core aims was that the town should use the Cittaslow framework as what Adele called a ‘filter’ through which to make decisions, making it, in Adam’s terms, a philosophy that infuses the town and what happens in it. Current concerns related particularly to urban housing policy and planning, and their interest in influencing this through a Cittaslow lens.

Finally, Katoomba is the largest town (with a population of over 8000 people) in the City of the Blue Mountains, with the Mountains area also incorporating 26 other towns and villages in this rural part of New South Wales (110 km west of Sydney). Originally a mining settlement with a railway link, Katoomba was subsequently shaped by waves of scenic tourism between the late 19th century and the1990s. The Blue Mountains area has more recently become an affordable lifestyle change option for people wanting to escape urban pressures and prices of Sydney. The area’s sense of ‘uniqueness’ is defined in relation to both its cultural and ‘natural’ heritage. Katoomba’s engagement with Cittaslow, as described to us by Nigel and Sue was framed in relation to long-term strategies of resilience to two ongoing threats which likewise correspond with the local sense of the cultural and natural dimensions of the town, of: a very real bush fire risk in an environment prone to high temperatures and drought (in October 2013 there were indeed bush fires in the area); and what they saw as ‘inappropriate’ urban development.

Only 11 percent of the land in the Blue Mountains area is available for human habitation, the area is described as a ‘City within a National Park’ and 70 percent of the area is part of a World Heritage National Park. The ‘natural’ environment is also a key representational theme, for instance a digital exhibit at Katoomba’s Cultural Heritage centre projects giant video images on to the walls and ceiling of trees, rivers, fields of wild grasses, shifting skies and storms. Alongside this emphasis on the rural context there is a strong local history of community activism in Katoomba focusing on contestation around the politics and practices of urban planning in the area. Nigel and Sue ensured we had a deep appreciation of the significance of the area through firsthand experience of the key rural sites they took us to, making the possibility of imagining a bushfire threat considerably more powerful. In parallel to the explicit narratives of recovery expressed in the other Slow Cities, Nigel and Sue also emphasized a need for the protection, recovery and ongoing production of the town’s cultural heritage including the built environment. To express this element of the town to us, they led us on a detailed walking tour along the main street of Katoomba, to experience its mixture of original Victorian and deco buildings, historical and more recent in-fill architecture, along with new chain stores and supermarkets. Nigel, an architect had a deep knowledge of the town’s buildings and had been involved at various stages in the development of some of them. He guided us through the visible signs of local cultural heritage, for example, as we explored the materiality of an art deco café, which retains its original features. Yet our tour also encountered the poignancy of the town’s invisible but sensed history as Nigel took us up close to the meaning of the historical detail that we could not ‘see’, by describing the architectural features hidden underneath more recent adaptations of high street buildings. For instance, leading us through the clothing racks of a bargain store, up some steps onto a raised area at the back of the shop, he explained that we were standing where a theatre stage had been, inviting us to imagine the historic circle seats which were still intact above us but obscured by the boarded-over ceiling. For Nigel and Sue, who is a planner, Katoomba’s claims to specialness then lay in part with knowing, engaging with, seeking to recover, and protecting a particular historical sense of built environment and heritage. Yet this was a complex task because Katoomba’s built environment was influenced by multiple and entangled interests and forms of regulation. This included those of community activists, local council and businesses and broader corporate investments. For instance while Katoomba had avoided a fast food chain setting up in the area through a NSW state regulation, which doesn’t permit ‘restaurants’ with a drive-through service, major supermarkets had become established in the town despite local protests, and one of these had sponsored the Cultural Heritage Centre. Such points of contestation, and interweaving indicate that as part of place, the emergence of resilience is embedded in complex relational negotiations and multi-scalar activity and strategies. These bring together the materiality and sentiments of the ‘specialness’ of locality and global elements to mutually constitute place. Cittaslow membership does not therefore make a town resilient in the sense that Cittaslow leaders are empowered with agency to prevent the encroachment of unwanted businesses or buildings. Rather Cittaslow offers a framework which enables these negotiations in ways that go beyond binary forms of resistance against very powerful external forces and materialitues, and produces a way in which an alternative, from which emerge degrees of resilience, can be lived with these materialities and forces.

In each of the towns we have discussed, forms of emergent resilience involved the securing of local specialness, through drawing together the ‘natural’, cultural and social resources already existing in towns. In ways consistent with those implied by Ingold’s theory of making, ⁸⁴ then the making of localities, agency and activism in this context ‘does not pre-exist its doing’ ⁸⁵ but is performative, relational and in process. As we have seen in these examples, slow city leaders invested what they felt was already there in the Cittaslow criteria. They delved into their biographical memories of a ‘sense of place’, and imagined a future. They become active in their worlds through the process of making/remaking their towns where processes of making emerge out of and in dialogue with a complex ecology of place, which involves the multiple scalar levels of personal sensory memories, council officials, Cittaslow International criteria and corporate forces. It is by bringing these historical, environmental and cultural dimensions into a narrative about what they ‘already are’ that the present becomes invested in a future, framed by the movement. ⁸⁶

Scale and the politics of resilience

While we have critiqued assumptions that the Slow movement is merely an off shoot of a broader politics of resistance against the global, there is clearly a ‘politics’ to the work of Cittaslow, which is not accounted for in a theory of making or indeed in the notion of resilience. At the beginning of this article we suggested that Cittaslow’s participants might be seen as engaging in indirect or lifestyle activism, involving forms of localized and practical civic engagement. This might superficially seem to have something in common with what John Tomaney refers to as a parochial outlook that ‘values the local, its culture and solidarities, as a moral starting point and locus of ecological concern and a site for the development of virtues including commitment, fidelity, civility and nurture’. ⁸⁷ However, in emphasizing the importance of locality and the sensory and the embodied our aim is not to suggest that the politics of Cittaslow is simply parochial. Indeed, as an ethnographic approach (in contrast to Tomaney’s which draws on poetic representations) shows, claims to specialness of locality in Slow Cities are intimately and strategically linked to broader struggles over how towns are defined, by whom and the material and environmental elements that are engaged for this. For instance, when concerned with the built environment, this might involve local residents, absent landlords, local and regional councils, their planning powers and resources, as well as global players such as corporate chain retailers representing concerns located ‘elsewhere’ at a national and/or global level. Moreover the local-global interchange is evidenced in the relation between Australian Cittaslow towns and the global Cittaslow movement. Australian town leaders have on the one hand drawn on Cittaslow’s international discourses and practices and processes of accreditation as a way of naming and legitimating their own strategic claims to uniqueness and specificity. At the same time they have challenged and re-articulated what some of them see as the originally Euro-centric nature of Cittaslow’s criteria. Such strategies and practices of protecting, and ongoingly making the uniqueness of the local matter, are productive of forms of resilience. Yet these forms of resilience are made in ecologies of place where different scales between local and global intersect. The missing link between conceptualizing the politics of making and resilience we would argue is the concept of scale.

As we have noted above, there is a growing literature examining and attempting to theorize the shifting nature, role and importance of scale. The work of Massey ⁸⁸ and Amin ⁸⁹ invites us to consider what might be seen as the multi-scalar configurations of Cittaslow activism through a theory of relationality. Of particular relevance is Massey’s notion of ‘place beyond place’, whereby rather than a bounded locality, the city and its constituents are understood as simultaneously products and producers of local, global and distant relations. Indeed in ways that are terminologically and disciplinarily distinct from but nevertheless compatible with Massey’s discussion of space,^90,91 Ingold has also argued the coming together of things and processes should not be understood as a process through which things that are essentially separate from each other become connected, or are positioned as ‘as against’ each other, but should rather be comprehended in terms of their mutual relationality, and potential to become entangled with each other. ⁹² We have also outlined how his theory of ‘making’ ⁹³ invites us to understand how design and making come together relationally, that is ‘where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived’. ⁹⁴ Massey’s, Amin’s and Marston et al’s work however add to Ingold’s perspective an appreciation of the political dimensions of the work of movements such as Cittaslow. Massey argues that ‘the relationality of space points to a politics of connectivity’. ⁹⁵ For both Massey and Amin, the relational politics of connectivity assumes that ‘the local’ necessarily is defined by and involves an extension into ‘other’ spaces and social relations, both distant and proximal, abstract and concrete. As Amin notes, the shift to relational, multi-scalar understandings of the local has accompanied interpretations by political economists amongst others ‘of globalisation as the proliferation or relativisation of spatial scales: the nesting of local scales of organisation and action within national, international, and transnational ones, and the politics of interscalar contestation’. ⁹⁶ Marston et al further critique ‘the local-to global conceptual architecture intrinsic to hierarchical scale’ because it creates a ‘cordoned register for resistance’. They instead argue for a notion of ‘horizontality’, which would open up possibilities for a ‘progressive politics’. ⁹⁷ As we now suggest, a revised, or reclaimed concept of resilience offers an alternative resolution to this problem.

If as we have proposed, we take Ingold’s concept of making seriously, then the way we understand contestation and resistance might be reconceived. This means that rather than seeking to situate Cittaslow’s way of making other ways of being and living as a form of place-based and scalar resistance or contestation we might instead understand it as an emergent form, in the ‘making’ and as such creating forms of resilience. Here in this politically imbued context resilience thus becomes a replacement for resistance, it might be seen precisely as emerging from ‘where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived’. ⁹⁸ Resilience as such becomes a way not of confronting the world directly, but a way in which what is not desired can, to some extent, be deflected, bounced off, channelled away, or made to matter less. Thinking about resilience in this way moreover offers an explanation of how the notion of progressive localism might be played out in in existing/experienced realities. Slow Cities like the progressive localism described by Featherstone et al move beyond a ‘defensive’ mode to instead become ‘expansive in their geographical reach and productive of new relations between places and social groups. ⁹⁹ As Featherstone et al suggest ‘progressive localisms can feed into broader social and political movements that aim to transform national and international policy frameworks’. ¹⁰⁰ If we refigure the idea of progressive localism through the notion of resilience as making we thus add to their proposal by suggesting how such shifts from the defensive to the expansive modes might take place. In the Australian example Cittaslow leaders have achieved this by using the global Cittaslow framework to pull together existing resources, reconstitute a sense of specialness and create future-oriented narratives of recovery in the face of crisis or threats.

Such an understanding thus assumes that place is relational and a configuration that is not bounded in a scalar hierarchy but that intertwines the local, global, regional and more in complex and often ironic ways. It is from this entanglement that new forms of resilience emerge.

Conclusion

Since it was established in Italy in 1999, the Cittaslow movement has had significant impact around the world with its potentially transformative framework being adopted and adapted by towns across 27 countries. An essential element of Cittaslow’s approach is its focus on building capacity through valuing the specialness of localities and bringing together their existing strengths. While the Cittaslow movement has conventionally been analysed as resistant to forces of globalization, we have reframed the movement’s mode of activism through a revised concept of resilience. Resilience, as we define it is not a fixed state or quality that is attributable to towns. Rather, we argue that it emerges from the ways in which the complexity of flows, and processual realities and negotiations that constitute everyday life in towns are harnessed.

To rework the notion of resilience, we have engaged with Ingold’s theory of making ¹⁰¹ to contest conceptions of resilience as static and to query the potential agency of planners to implement forms of resilience that fit to prior representational categories. Using the example of Cittaslow, we have shown how a form of resilience can be understood to emerge at the local-global in between. An analysis of the processes through which Slow City leaders go about creating ways to protect the uniqueness or aid the recovery of their local environments and lifestyles relationally, guided by a theory of making, invites us to define the outcome rather than the agency of Cittaslow leaders’ activities as creating as a form of resilience. The Cittaslow framework, like a progressive localism ¹⁰² encourages an interweaving of the already existing elements of the local in relation to rather than against (for example) global retail flows or national and regional governance structures. Such ecologies of place, which traverse global, national, regional and local scales, are constituted through what we might think of as the Cittaslow imaginary, yet, they also have highly practical impacts and outcomes in towns as they involve forging creative, sustainable and locally-based ways of coping with and after drought, bush fires and the encroachment of corporate capitalism. Further, we have emphasized the ways in which the forms of local resilience that characterize Slow Cities are embedded in the sensory and the everyday. As we have shown, sensorial and convivial appreciations of the ‘specialness’, uniqueness and of locality and of what matters to local people, enable forms of resilience to emerge through the making of embodied and collective forms of wellbeing, pleasure and quality of life.

Cittaslow activism forges intertwined narratives and practices of wellbeing ¹⁰³ and resilience that successfully interweave local, national and global scales and everyday, civic and policy domains. This achievement, we argue, holds key lessons for design in planning and policy, where the representational categories of wellbeing and resilience are often established goals. We propose that as a category and objective for policy and planning, resilience needs to be re-thought. This re-thinking would involve attention to its qualities as processual, as happening where different scalar realities meet and as part of the sensory and affective ways that people engage with others and with their environment.