Just take collectivism in this context: the 20th century was the century of collectivist ideologies but also of mass culture and large-scale production. The assembly line principle of large factories is the economic equivalent of the gigantic concrete constructions inspired by Le Corbusier, built in the same short-sighted manner as was so much else in the 20th century: in order to be quickly and easily replaced; without any perspective of history or the future; and based on a de-individualised, instrumental view of humans – people as cogs in a giant social machine.

The 20th century was the century that focused on the now and fetishised the new-fangled, the era when Westerners didn’t think they had anything to learn from alien cultures of the past. This was the century when we sought a sense of the contemporary rather than timelessness, replaceability rather than durability, change rather than stability, challenge rather than security. And at the heart of this culture, just like in the suburb, is the shopping mall. All roads lead here. It is not surprising that shopping at the end of the century seemed to be not just a pastime on its own but the way to self-actualisation.

Yet the 20th century is also the century of speed. The very idea underlying the suburb is that it should be possible to reach everything by the most rapid means of conveyance: the car, the commuter train, the bus etc. It is a paradox that most of this has in fact come to take more time, even though the speeds have increased. Shopping in a classic small city is much more efficient than heading to a big-box retailer on the motorway and finding parking in the gigantic lot.

Something similar can be said about the new information technology: even though everything is happening faster and faster, it’s a case of speed at the expense of efficiency With an iPhone, people can manage to read the paper while eating breakfast, send a tweet on Twitter while stuck in traffic, make a lunch date by text en route from the parking lot to the office and text their income tax return while waiting for their computer to start up.

But reading a novel takes forever because people are always distracted by having to check their phone for new e-mails, new text messages and new blog postings. Yet if the 20th century utopia was focused on large-scale production, collectivism, speed and the brand new, perhaps the 21st century shows signs of the opposite. This is a consequence of it now being time to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the 20th century. What one’s mind fixes on in particular is the lack of long-term thinking and sustainability that has characterised so much of 20th century culture – with consequences for the environment, our physical and mental health but also our finances and well-being.

This at least is the conclusion drawn by a number of new projects with a utopian bent that have begun to experience strong growth in this first decade of the 21st century. One of these is called the Cittaslow movement, which started in Italy in 1999 and is now spreading across Europe (with Falköping as the only Swedish exponent). This in turn emanated from ideas associated with Slow Food. The Slow Food movement is a network of individuals, restaurants and companies that want to work according to different principles than those prevailing in the fast food industry, while Cittaslow is a network for small cities, more specifically, cities with no more than 50,000 residents.

The underlying idea here is to safeguard what is of local origin and unique to the area, in contrast to the tendencies of globalisation, which have resulted in standardisation and uniformity. Cities undergo a complex application process to show that they meet some fifty requirements to be accepted as a Cittaslow, criteria aimed at creating sustainable solutions that are friendly to humans and the environment. The goal is to preserve the city’s originality and safeguard its historical buildings by encouraging renovation that respects the past and uses environmentally responsible building materials. Following this line of thought, big-box stores and fast-food chains will be reduced; anachronistic and aesthetically inappropriate neon signs will be removed from old buildings. But people are also working to promote local and ecologically grown products as well as the kind of local artisan activities and businesses that are threatened by chain stores spreading out into every shopping mall, with exactly the same goods everywhere.

Cittaslow is an example of the small-scale utopia that is as practically feasible and humanly possible as a utopia should be to avoid stagnating in the experimental stage of a concept that most 20th century projects should never have moved beyond. In this issue of Axess, we discuss the conditions for a new, efficient, and time-saving slowness – with a view to the future and not to the present.