“Slowness As a Solution, or, What a Finnish Mom of Seven Can Teach Us About Traffic”

Tiina Männistö-Funk (01 December 2024)

“Why would a typical, middle-aged driver think of himself as a specialist of residential streets?”

This was the question Anneli Alanen, a Finnish mother of seven, addressed in 1982 to the traffic planners of her nearest city, Tampere. Anneli Alanen (1928–2015) was a nurse and a stay-at-home mother. She lived most of her life in the small town of Pirkkala in southern Finland. In the late 1970s, around the time she turned 50, she became a traffic activist and continued to be active in traffic questions into her 70s.

Alanen is not well known, even in her native country. But her thought-provoking ideas about traffic - which can contribute to contemporary debates on road violence, walkable cities, and the future of transport - merit more attention. In this post, I explore Alanen’s views of slowness as a solution to problems and injustices caused by traffic in our immediate environments. I argue that we need the kinds of perspectives introduced by Alanen, in order to address the most pressing mobility issues of our times.

Alanen wanted to redefine both the concept of traffic and the adequate sources of traffic information by calling the slowest traffic participants the VIPs of traffic whose transport knowledge should be taken into account and made use of in planning and decision making. In the picture a specifically Nordic slow mode, a kicksled, in the small town of Valtimo in 1988.

Photo: Nurmes Town Museum.

Slowness was central to Alanen’s thinking. She argued for redefining traffic and traffic expertise around slow mobilities and slow individuals. She credited her experience as a mom of seven for giving her a unique perspective on issues of mobility and questioned why “middle-aged drivers” were perceived as default experts on the topic. More broadly, people with children, the elderly, pedestrians, cyclists or people using mobility aids such as wheelchairs were the most relevant experts when it came to streets. Unlike motorists, for whom the street and its sides were often reduced to a quickly passing landscape seen through a windshield, those who moved at slower speeds held a rich knowledge of their surrounding environment.

What can Alanen’s insights teach us about mobility? In her 2018 book, Mobility Justice, sociologist Mimi Sheller criticised the concept of spatial justice in urban studies as being rigidly immobile. According to Sheller, when considering urban justice, it is essential to take mobility into account. Accessing services is one thing, but mobility shapes places and the justice or injustice of places in significant ways. In Sheller's analysis, speed is one of the components of transport injustice. The socially disadvantaged often have to make do with slower modes than the well-off. Inspired by Anneli Alanen, I argue that we also need to ask what speed does to the places where we move. Speed and slowness, understood both as concepts and as physical phenomena, have shaped our cities. Reversing the primacy that planners have given to speed, and valuing slowness, as Alanen campaigned for, is more important than ever.

The Destructive Promise of Speed

According to transport historian Barbara Schmucki, urban planners across Europe favored the car city as an ideal model from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. Urban planning of the time aimed at ensuring a smooth flow of car traffic. Other modes of transport were to be kept out of the way of the cars. Often this was done in the name of safety, but the aim was also to make passenger car traffic as efficient as possible.

The dream of free-flowing car traffic was an important part of modernist urban planning. Le Corbusier, the leading modernist, idealised free-flowing car traffic in his 1933 book The Radiant City. To achieve this ideal, he argued that other functions of the street had to be eliminated and modes of transport separated. This separation became an important design principle in the following decades. However, it was difficult to create separate routes for all modes of transport in city centres. In practice, the preference was for efficient car use. This led to tram services closing and cycling being seen as a relic of the past, as both were perceived as obstacles to efficient car use. Walking did not need to be completely eliminated, as it usually already had its own space, pavements (or sidewalks, for our American readers). However, with increasing car traffic, walking became more unpleasant and difficult. In the ideal city of cars, you would have separate pedestrian areas, often on shopping streets or commercial centres. In practice, conflicts almost systematically arose between speed and slowness. And speed always won.

However, the free flow of cars proved an impossible task in cities, even with the enormous investments in car infrastructure. Parking, for one, was a thorny issue. More and more areas had to be cleared for parked cars and a large part of the street itself had to be reserved for parking. Cars slowed themselves down and speed often existed only on an imaginary level. And yet, the promise of speed was still allowed to dictate how urban space should be designed.

An early Finnish slow-street in the city of Tampere in the 1980s. Anneli Alanen campaigned for these kinds of residential streets with physical traffic calming solutions. She collected information about different solutions internationally and distributed it among local planners and diverse transport organisations.

Photo: The Finnish Labour Museum Werstas.

Speed As a Question of Equality

Alanen is one of the transport activists I am studying in my current research project on the history of non-motorised modes during the latter part of the 20th century. From the 1970s onwards, she campaigned vigorously for slow streets at a time when traffic calming measures were an unknown entity in Finland. For her, slowing down motorised traffic was key to creating safe and pleasant environments.

Anneli Alanen argued that motorised traffic, and especially passenger cars and their advocates, had managed to highjack the concept of traffic. Car-driving men filled traffic committees and other places where traffic-related decisions were made. To counteract this phenomenon, Alanen called the non-motorised “people of the road side” the real experts of the street: they, after all, were the ones spending the longest time on it while car drivers only flew by. Alanen did not have a formal education in traffic planning or related fields. Her involvement in transport policy started as she was selected as the chair-woman of the local home-owner’s association and launched a project to test a slow street in her neighbourhood. Alanen was surprised and shocked by the resistance towards the traffic calming measures. This experience made her critical towards the way in which transport issues were treated both locally and nationally.

As she explained in the early 1980s to a journalist: “At every level, traffic questions have been left to men to take care of. The municipal traffic committees are usually entirely male. These committees decide, for example, about speed limits. They don’t have the necessary grassroot expertise. Should we not legally include women and representatives of non-motorised modes in traffic committees? Moving around with children is quite something else than the busy movements of decision-making men.”

The idea of favouring slower modes of transport in cities is not new. For example, in Helsinki, walking was officially defined as the most important mode of transport in the city centre as early as 1971, at which point the car-centred urban planning ideal was abandoned. However, car-friendly thinking had been cemented in infrastructure and had found its ways into planning guidelines. At the same time as environmental concerns grew, the efficiency of transportation was increasingly perceived as crucial for economic growth. An unequal distribution of space had become the norm.

Current transport studies indicate that car use continues to be unevenly distributed according to age, gender, and income level, all around the world. Typically, old and young people drive less than middle-aged people, women less than men, and the poor less than the rich. Instead, they move more slowly: by public transport or cycling and walking. The allocation of street space to different modes of transport is therefore also an equality issue, although this is often overlooked when talking about transport. Again, we can approach the issue in terms of speed and slowness. Why do the fastest get the most space on the streets and who are they? Why do others have to give way so that some can move faster? And if we take the finiteness of natural resources into account, can it still be considered as economically efficient to move things and people as quickly as possible as far as possible?

Anneli Alanen’s activism was informed by her own experiences as a mother of seven children. She argued that women, who often spent a lot of time walking with children in their living environment, not only had different needs but also richer knowledge about that environment than car-drivers flying by. The photo shows a woman with two children in 1970 where Alanen lived with her family before moving to the small town of Pirkkala.

Photo: Eeva Rista/Helsinki City Museum.

Slowness As the Key to Justice

Sociologist John Urry has argued that car as the dominant mode of transport does not only change places, it also reorganises social life and the nature of time. As societies become built around motoring, car travel becomes the standard for time. Perhaps that is why we are so inclined to submit to the tyranny of speed, or to the promise of it, to accept noisy and dangerous living environments in its name, to be alert and ready to jump out of the way when cars approach.

Anneli Alanen saw things differently. She campaigned for slower modes to be taken into account in planning. Many of the slow users of street space are in need of spacious passageways and comfortable places to rest, benches and quiet routes. While focusing on driving speed makes environments unpleasant and exclusionary, focusing on slowness improves places. Instead of speed, what we need is the inviting and inclusive calm of greater slowness.

In transport planning based on narrow notions of “efficiency,” walking has become the odd one out. It is difficult to make it more efficient or to measure it with tools similar to those used for motorised transport. Walking is ill-suited to models that measure the speed of travel. This is precisely why it could be the key to challenging prevailing norms and ways of thinking. Focusing attention on slow modes of transport could help to identify and use non-speed-based metrics to assess the performance of transport systems, instead focusing for example on the impacts on well-being, social cohesion and environment. In a world where climate crisis and biodiversity loss are unfurling at a rapid pace, we cannot continue to base our lives on a constant acceleration for some, as we have done so far. Instead, we must slow down. What if slowing down, as Alanen suggested, was not perceived as a problem, but as the beginning of a solution?

Tiina Männistö-Funk is an academy research fellow at the University of Turku, Finland. This text is partially based on a text earlier published in Finnish in the Politiikasta webjournal of Finnish Political Science Association: https://politiikasta.fi/kaveltava-kaupunki-poliittisena-kysymyksena-hitaus-tarjoaa-ratkaisuja-liikenteen-ongelmiin/.

This piece was initially presented at a workshop held by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter (hybrid) on 4-5 July 2024. It was supported by Wellcome Trust Centre Grant [203109/Z/16/Z] and explored “Everyday Mobilities: Social, Cultural, and Environmental Perspectives on Getting Around.” (You can see event recordings here - day 1; day 2.). In recent years, daily travel - especially in urban spaces - has been increasingly politicised. Concerns about the climate emergency, air pollution, and inequities of health and risk exposures have shifted discussions about everyday mobility, simultaneously producing new policy thinking, planning experiments, activist movements, and public backlash. This workshop explored these developments, examining the social relations, cultural frames, and environmental concerns with which everyday travel has become entangled in different local, national, and transnational contexts, as well as attending to the varied histories and possible futures of "getting around”. The "Everyday Mobilities” series on M&M is a first step towards the establishment of an Everyday Mobilities interdisciplinary network bringing together scholars, practitioners and campaigners.