Powers - New slow city: living simply in the worlds fastest city

More praise for New Slow City

New Slow City tells an inspiring story. At the outset, Powerss goal to live slowly and mindfully in frantic Manhattan seems quixotic in the extreme. But one should never underestimate a determined idealist. This delightfully provocative book will speak to anyone trying to build a balanced life in our crazy world. I first came to know Powerss work because we coincidentally share the same name. Now I read him to question my own assumptions and reimagine how to live.

William Powers, New York Timesbestselling author of Hamlets BlackBerry

An inspirational quest to slow down, simplify, and find serenity in a supercharged city. William Powers discovers the joy in less stuff, less work, and less speed!

Francine Jay, author of The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide

Bill Powers takes a New York minute and turns it into an hour as he slows down to truly appreciate the all-too-hurried city he calls home. He and his wife live well in a tiny West Village cubbyhole, escaping a long commute from Queens, and in this engaging book he lets us in on what he learns, holding our interest all the way. Powerss message, honed through his experiences living in poor countries like Bolivia, shows that we can live simply, sustainably, and happily. And I know its real because I stayed with him in his tiny place. But Powers also slows down at least as important as scaling down and learns to savor the little daily miracles of life. This message may be just what you need to change your own life for the better. Dont miss it!

John de Graaf, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Affluenza and Whats the Economy For, Anyway? and executive director of Take Back Your Time

In an amusing account of his attempt to live the slow life in the city of speed in a micro-apartment in Manhattan, William Powers reminds us that while New York may be an overstuffed and unsustainable engine of growth and self-importance, its also a collection of islands nestled in a rich bioregion. Accounts of the natural environment clashing with the glass and steel of the city make this an important reminder that our precarious urban existence need not barrel forth into oblivion. Powers places the difficult decisions we face on a daily basis into an equation that should provide us all with an optimistic glimpse of how to slow our lives down. Read New Slow City and watch as its insights pepper your daily decisions while you navigate the folly of the fast life.

Richard McCarthy, executive director of Slow Food USA

In New Slow City, William Powers offers us his challenging and delightful story of learning to live with less in the heart of New York City. In his warm narrative style, Powers guides the reader through the struggles he and his wife face in getting rid of stuff and squeezing their lives into a 350-square-foot micro-apartment. This work is a profound witness that a meaningful and joyful life of conservation is possible, even amid the powers of speed in the quintessential American city.

C. Christopher Smith, senior editor of the Englewood Review of Books and coauthor of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus

Is it possible to live an earth-friendly and spiritually fulfilling life in the middle of the bustle of a big city? William Powers and his wife are the perfect people to find out. I found that the tales of the remarkable people they meet, the challenges they confront, and the beauty and joy they discover nourished a part of my soul that rarely gets fed. Never preachy, always entertaining, and often wise, this is a splendid book for anyone wanting to bring more heart and joy to urban living.

John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America and cofounder and president of the Food Revolution Network

NEW

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ALSO BY WILLIAM POWERS

Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africas Fragile Edge

Whispering in the Giants Ear:

A Frontline Chronicle from Bolivias War on Globalization

Twelve by Twelve:

A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

Copyright 2014 by William Powers

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover and interior illustrations by Kyle Pierce, kylepierceillustration.com

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

First printing, November 2014

ISBN 978-1-60868-239-3

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

New World Library is proud to be a Gold Certified Environmentally Responsible Publisher. Publisher certification awarded by Green Press Initiative. www.greenpressinitiative.org

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THIS BOOK ORIGINATED with a somewhat angry question. It came from a reader of Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream, my previous book about living in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot off-grid cabin in North Carolina. Its easy, she wrote, to find minimalism, joy, connection to nature, and abundant time in a shack in the woods. But how the hell are the rest of us supposed to stay sane in our busy modern lives?

I received a hundred variations of this question in emails, after lectures, and during television and radio interviews about Twelve by Twelve.

I always answered by saying I was living 12 12 values... but in Queens, New York the home to which I returned after my time in the cabin. But as each year passed, the readers doubt increasingly became my own as overwork, material clutter, and the lack of contact with nature civilization, in short brought me to a point of extreme unhappiness in Queens. Eventually, I too doubted it was possible to live 12 12 in a city, and I felt an urgent need to decamp far from urban life.

Not so fast. As I reached this point, my newlywed wife, Melissa, was offered an excellent job that demanded we stay put in New York City, and I suddenly had no choice but to figure out how to take what Id learned in the 12 12 about the Leisure Ethic, connecting to nature, and living simply and somehow make it work in the real-world context of a marriage and two careers.

In an attempt to do this, Melissa and I embarked on an experiment. We sold or gave away 80 percent of our stuff, left our 1,600-square-foot Queens townhouse, crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, and moved into a tiny rental: a 340-square-foot micro-apartment roughly two 12 12s on the fifth floor of a nineteenth-century walk-up in downtown Manhattan.

New Slow City is a memoir of that experience, in which we spent a year living the Leisure Ethic in a New York minute. It is an adventure into smart-city trends ranging from Slow Food and Slow Travel to technology fasting, urban sanctuaries, bodysurfing the Rockaways, and rooftop farming. Books like David Owens Green Metropolis (on the eco-city), Carl Honors In Praise of Slowness (on the global Slow movement), and Alex Mitchells