Urban social movements and small places: Slow Cities as sites of activism

In this paper I consider the significance of smaller urban contexts for the comparative analysis of contemporary urban social movements. Existing literature on urban social movements tends to focus on how they are manifested in big cities. Here I suggest that the questions they address might be addressed equally usefully in relation to smaller urban settlements. In doing I take the Slow City (Cittàslow) movement (whose member towns have populations of less that 50,000) as a case study. Through an analysis of three domains of the movement’s activity (the transnational; the national and its relationships with the state; and the local context) I examine how, by connecting local concerns with wider environmental
issues, Cittàslow is implicated in processes of social change.