PAUL TRANTER & CO PLUS

He is the Founding Director of Rodney Tolley Walks and is an experienced international speaker and consultant. He was Reader in Geography at Staffordshire University in the UK until 2004, and is now the Conference Director of Walk21, a global partnership of walking researchers and practitioners.

Rodney Tolley has researched and written in the field of active, sustainable transport for over 40 years. He co-authored Children and Their Urban Environment: Changing Worlds (Routledge, 2011), and co-edited Risk, Protection, Provision and Policy, Volume 12 in Geographies of Children and Young People (Springer, 2017). His research demonstrates that child-friendly modes (walking, cycling and public transport) are also the modes that (paradoxically) reduce time pressure for urban residents. Paul is an Honorary Associate Professor of Geography in the School of Science at UNSW Canberra, Australia, where his research focuses on two critical and related issues for modern cities: children's well-being and the dominance of speed and mobility in urban planning and society. A Sydney Morning Herald article by Elizabeth Farrelly provides a commentary on Slow Cities: Conquering our speed addiction for health and sustainability relating the ideas in the book to David Attenborough's new film A Life On Our Planet. 2020, Build slower cities or keep careering towards disaster, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 October, 2020. The future, if we're to have one, will be slower, closer and inestimably more interesting. There's not much point in building our way out of pandemic if it drives us over the cliff of climate change.

PAUL TRANTER & CO PLUS

Plus there's the economic benefit of actually surviving. Slow cities foster cafe economies: resilient, small-scale, healthy, with far lower health, land, infrastructure and transport costs. As with most destructive behaviours, the excuse is economic, but Tranter and Tolley point out that this too is illusory. Our speed addiction is every bit as destructive as dependence on speed of the other sort. But they're dangerous and duplicitous deities, making us destroy our cities and our planet and still not delivering the promised time savings. For a century, speed and efficiency have been our gods. The 20th century was focused largely on burning the past to expand the present. The other is a book - Slow Cities by Paul Tranter and Rodney Tolley - examining the same issue from the other end of the telescope. One is David Attenborough's extraordinary new film, A Life on Our Planet, which recounts humanity's greatest mistake - and how we can fix it. Two new works bookend this question in a way that seems tailored to this particular historical instant. How that works goes to how we conceive and colonise planet Earth. This book also offers a holistic assessment of the impact of speed on daily behaviours and life choices, and shows how a move to slow down will - perhaps surprisingly - increase accessibility to the city services and activities that support healthy, sustainable lives and cities. It identifies effective methods, strategies and policies for decreasing the speed of motorised traffic and encouraging a modal shift to walking, cycling and public transport. Using research from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the book demonstrates ways in which human, economic and environmental health are improved with a slowing of city transport. This book examines the ways individuals and societies became dependent on transport modes that required investment in speed.

Slow Cities: Conquering Our Speed Addiction for Health and Sustainability demonstrates, counterintuitively, that reducing the speed of travel within cities saves time for residents and creates more sustainable, liveable, prosperous and healthy environments.

Paul tranter & co