I have seen the future of the automobile - and it’s sleek, sexy and fast as hell. It’s also environmentally-friendly.

On Monday, I took part in the annual Eco-Rally from Brighton to London. It’s a showcase for the new technologies that are greening automobiles of all shapes and sizes.

On a day of wind and patchy sunshine, fifteen of us drove a convoy of state-of-the-art sedans, sports cars and vans from the south coast of England to City Hall beside Tower Bridge in London. Our vehicles were powered by everything from solar energy to electricity to vegetable oil – with petrol and diesel often playing a part, too (think hybrids). Many of the cars were built using green materials and methods.

What does all this have to do with Slow?

Quite a lot, actually. We have allowed traffic to blight our towns and cities. A central plank of the Slow revolution is to take back the streets from the automobile.

That means a lot less driving and a lot more walking, cycling, scootering, rollerblading, street football and parties, road hockey, etc. Building a strong public transport network should be a top priority for every politician. As should cutting carbon emissions.

When it comes to cars, less is more.

But let’s be honest: there will always be a need (not to mention a desire) for private automobiles that can shuttle us from A to B. The key then is to make these vehicles as green as possible. And that is were the Eco-Rally comes in.

On Monday, I drove the Lotus Eco Elise. It’s a zippy, no-nonsense roadster with an engine that growls like an irked lion. The interior is lined with hemp and eco-wool.

My passenger was the clever and rather beautiful founder of a green consultancy. So picture the scene: hot car, hot blonde, heading-for-middle-age me at the wheel.

I felt like I’d stumbled into someone’s mid-life crisis. Possibly my own.

But the highlight of the day was taking the Tesla for a spin. There is only one word for this car: Wow! It is totally electric and almost completely silent, which means zero air and noise pollution. It also looks like something James Bond would drive, neatly obliterating the old saw that eco-friendly means boring and worthy.

And did I mention that the Tesla is mind-blowingly quick? We’re talking 0-60 MPH in 3.9 seconds. I have never felt acceleration like it. This is the kind of G-force you experience in a souped-up supercar, or a jet fighter.

The Tesla is a breakthrough. Okay, it costs a small fortune. But it shows that we can build zero-emission cars without sacrificing style, performance or sex appeal. And already a cheaper four-door model is coming to market.

But what about all that speed?

As an advocate of Slow, I certainly felt a pang of guilt climbing into the Tesla. But I have to admit that the unease didn’t last long. After the first surge of acceleration, I was whooping like a teenager on a rollercoaster. It was a bit terrifying, but also hugely exhilarating.

Can drivers be trusted with that kind of power at their fingertips? Can I be trusted? I have my doubts.

Which probably means I should stop fantasizing about getting a Tesla for Christmas …

No matter who you are or what you do, the current economic situation most likely has your feelings fluctuating from anxious and fearful to unstable and depressed. There are very real causes for alarm. A seventy-year old money manager ejects clients from meetings for asking too many questions and siphons billions of their dollars from the economy. Poaching lenders offer rickety mortgages to people who lack the resources to sustain them. Huge public companies fudge their earnings reports to appease and allure stockholders. Worst of all, there is no government oversight to prevent these and other means of relieving people of their hard-earned cash.

This was the status quo, what we considered normal, as recently as six months ago. As long as the dollars rolled in, and we could go out to dinner whenever we wanted, and take the vacations we desired, and afford the best schools for our children, most of us turned a blind eye. Then the illness in our economy continued to fester until its tentacles slithered around each of our lives. It wasn’t until we each personally felt its grip that we were able to slow down and awake from our slumber.

After not qualifying in 2006 for his first tournament since becoming a professional golfer nine years earlier, Tiger Woods was asked what he was going to do. He replied: “Practice.” Like Tiger, each of us can also “fail wisely.” The word ‘failure’, in fact, is a failure as a concept. It makes you feel badly about yourself, when in fact if you’re willing to slow down enough to catch sight of the larger picture you will see it as an opportunity for learning. If you take this approach, what others call ‘failure’ will become for you a critical ingredient for success. Semantics are important here, because they affect the way we think. While the word ‘failure’ makes you feel like you’re on a dead-end street, the word ‘challenge’ puts a fire under your belly to seek an alternate route to your goals. It’s also ironic that the word ‘challenge’ literally contains the word ‘change’ within it.

We now have a fire under our collective belly. We must introduce new practices into our economy so we can be successful again. This is nothing new. There have always been crises, and they will always be a key ingredient in our life experience. To survive them, good civic-minded citizens always pick up the pieces and press on. This is what we did after 9-11, when we leveraged the learning from that horrific event to heighten public security. The impetus for FDR’s New Deal, which introduced a social safety net for low-income Americans, was the poignant suffering the lack of that net produced in The Great Depression. In both of these critical periods in our history, the crisis became the catalyst. It signaled the need to transform a problematic status quo into a new, more resilient and secure status quo.

There is a parallel to our personal lives: when you look back on just about any major crisis you’ve experienced – whether it was a messy breakup, or a protracted feeling of depression, or fear-induced anxiety that left you feeling paralyzed, or being fired from a job that you really cared about – that crisis helped you discover something under-developed within yourself that you needed to work on. No crisis, no catalyst, no significant life change.

“But how can I stay positive when I may not have a job in six months?” I have been asked frequently over the last few months by some of the CEOs and executives I coach. First of all, what’s the alternative? I don’t think you want to go there. Second, being positive tests your resolve. You only know how strong a dam is when there’s water trying to push it over. If you want to integrate any value you hold dear into your character – including being positive – then you must practice it in good times and bad, rain or shine, regardless of the current state of your job or the stock tickers floating across your screen.

Having a positive outlook underwrites your happiness. Both stem from appreciating what you have rather than focusing on what you don’t have. And there is always something to appreciate if you are only willing to slow down and step off the treadmill you’re on long enough to take a look around. Fewer customers may free up your time to diversify the products you offer and develop higher-touch strategies to build a more loyal customer base for the future. Less time on the job may mean more time to reconnect with your loved ones. Being abruptly thrown off what you considered your track to career success may give you the time to question whether you were running in the right lane in the first place.

Find something to be positive about each day while simultaneously learning from the adversity you are currently experiencing, and you will find a better path forward. If we all rise to this collective challenge, we will build an economy that is not only robust but founded on sound practices. Also, and just as important, we will slow down enough to enjoy life a whole lot more.

It feels like Spring must almost be here in the middle of Canada. It has been a long winter. I still have a lot of snow in my yard. But the weather is warming up and the sun is shining brightly. It won’t be long until we can enjoy the sight of flowers and green grass, and the sound of birds singing in the trees.  Here in Winnipeg, we have long, cold winters and a long, hot summers. Spring and Autumn are short. Blink and you miss them. This creates sudden transitions between extremes.

From a Slow Urbanist perspective, the extreme weather influences how people use the urban environment. Many people balk at the thought of giving up their cars in favour of walking. They enjoy the comfort of heated transportation in the winter, and air-conditioned in the summer. They drive out of their attached garage at home, and into their interior parking space at work. They go from climate-controlled environment at home, to climate-controlled environment at work, using climate-controlled transportation along the way. No need to feel cold in the winter or hot in the summer. Perfect comfort all year long.

I worry that we are missing something when we live entirely in these false environments. The Slow Urbanist experience involves being a part of your environment, experiencing the sense of place, and truly living in your city. I have nothing against living and working in comfortable environments. When it is -40 Celsius outside, you can only be outside for so long. And some people can handle the summer heat better than others. But what are we missing when we remove ourselves from the realities of our local context? 

We can become an integral part of our city environments by participating in them.  If we spend some time outside, using outdoor spaces – no matter the temperature – we become a part of the urban environment. We can interact with our context on visual and physical levels, and invite the beauty of place to influence our lives.  Seasons are important in cities.  They help to define our context. We lose much of our own quality of life if we ignore this passage of time and the visual changes around us.

“Today’s urban surroundings are a prefabricated environment. In them, people are observers, not participants. They exist disconnected from space and time.”

This sentence comes from the Time Foundation’s website www.timefoundation.com
When I was first introduced to the Time Foundation, I was intrigued to learn about it – including Ecokathedral. I would encourage you to take a look as well.

We can participate in our environment to varying degrees. In many situations, there are restrictions on the level of participation. But I believe we can help to shape our own environment by purposefully living our lives in a slow manner. And we can go further by advocating to make our urban environments reflect a slow philosophy.

The context in which we live our lives does have an impact on how our lives our lived.  However, it is ultimately ourselves who define how our own lives are lived. Much of this is due to personal or individual philosophy. We can chose how we are going to interact with the world on an emotional or intellectual level. It also works on a physical level. When we interact with the world on a daily basis, are we rushing through as an observer or are we taking meaningful steps towards participation? In many of our cities, this seems to be an individual choice. And it all comes down to time. When we chose to engage in our world and become connected in space and time we are also living a life that is more slow.

The complexity of our environment demands that stop rushing around as mere observers – although in many cases I think people aren’t even giving themselves the luxury of being observers!  We have the opportunity to foster relationships with other people, with the natural environment and the built environment … and with the cultures, traditions, hopes and dreams that we see each day.

We can take a page out of the Time Foundation’s theory and chose to participate fully in space and time, however that might be manifest in your own world.  Most of us do not have direct influence to actually change what our larger urban built environment – as well as our urban “natural” environment – looks like. However, we can chose to participate in that environment in a more meaningful way.

Take the slow approach and actually live in your city.

Living a slow life is really about taking the time for quality. The Slow Cities movement is attempting to translate this notion into a day-to-day reality for people living in urban environments.

Creating a city with slow infrastructural polices is key to the overall quality of life for its residents. The Slow Cities movement includes the following in its infrastructural polices:
- sustaining historical and culturally significant buildings
- promoting and building safe transportation
- a focus on alternative transportation options (including bicycle paths and a pedestrian focus)
- Accessibility for all
- Green Space
- Public lavatories

These goals work together to create a better experience for the city residents and tourists alike. When infrastructure is put in place to promote alternative transportation, it is more likely that this alternative transportation will be utilized. These infrastructure goals incorporate pedestrian walkways and greenspace.  Overall, it is a higher quality urban environment that is attained. And because of the pedestrian focus, it is more likely that each person will have a more intimate relationship and a greater awareness of their higher quality urban environment.

It is not always possible to take a slow transportation option everyone you go. Sometimes we are more rushed and need to hurry along to fit more into our day. Therefore, it is important to have a variety of well-designed transportation options available in an urban area. But if our cities give us the option of using beautifully designed and safe pedestrian routes there is a greater possibility that more and more people will take those routes. If more people are out walking, there is a higher degree of human interaction.  And these people are also more likely to lead healthy, active lifestyles.  Promoting pedestrian transportation options in a city will give the residents a chance to take a few steps in a slow lifestyle.  Even if they have no concept of what slow really represents, they can begin to interact with life at a different pace, and begin to enjoy the quality of that moment in time.