The Impact of the Slow City Movement on Place Authenticity, Entrepreneurial Opportunity, and Economic Development

Abstract

The Slow City (Cittaslow) concept represents an emerging global trend where participant small cities commit to growing sustainably by preserving their authenticity while celebrating their local culture and diversity. Meanwhile, marketers increasingly find authenticity to be critical for campaigns with efficacy. Using a sample of 762 residents from slow cities, neighboring cities, and other Turkish cities, the authors empirically examine the Slow City movement and demonstrate its positive impact on place authenticity. Slow City membership also positively moderates the effect of perceived authenticity on both perceived entrepreneurial opportunities and economic development, which positively impact quality of life and intention to stay respectively. The results also indicate that the benefits of the Slow City movement spill over to neighboring cities. The Slow City movement offers much promise for place marketing and has potential to slow down the heavy migration from rural to urban areas in emerging markets.

Overcoming Socio-Economic Problems in Crisis Areas through Revitalization of Cittaslow Towns. Evidence from North-East Poland

“…One such study analyzed the impact of belonging to the Cittaslow network on the increase in the quality of life and economic development of small Turkish cities. The results of the research conducted among 762 inhabitants of the selected slow cities show the benefits of the Cittaslow movement in terms of the development of the socioeconomic potential of the analyzed cities, which has a direct impact on the slowdown of strong migration of inhabitants to larger urban centres [49]. These results coincide with the results of our study in terms of the analyzed statistical indicators in 2015-2019, which indicate an increase in the number of business entities operating in the vast majority of analyzed cities (11), as well as a significant reduction in unemployment in all cities subject to the study (14).…”

Social Enterprise Places: A Place-Based Initiative Facilitating Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Constructions of Legitimacy

“…The findings contribute to our understanding of SEs beyond their internal machinations and start to reveal early empirical understandings of both a meso and macro level shaping of their legitimacy via the spatial and social context within which they operate (Cicek, Ulu and Uslay 2019;Munoz 2010). In addition to Kemper and Ballantine (2017), Casey, Lichrou and O'Malley (2017) and Samuel and Peattie's (2016) understandings of how socio-spatial interactions in distinct and general places can influence sustainable/ethical practices and consumption patterns, this work also suggests that the SEP environment, and its constituent actors, have combined to both facilitate the legitimacy of individual SEs and the SE movement as a whole.…”

Activities Undertaken in the Member Cities of the Polish National Cittaslow Network in the Area of “Energy and Environmental Policy”

“…There are articles available in the literature in which the authors attempt to evaluate the effects achieved by Cittaslow cities in selected areas in which cities function [5,73,74] or just in selected slow cities [7,23,[75][76][77]. In contrast, there is a scarcity of papers dedicated to effects achieved in all cities that belong to the national Cittaslow network in a given country [37].…”