Renata Roberts

Urban Slowsteading

What is Urban Slowsteading?

Urban Slowsteading™: a mindset that informs a lifestyle.

Urban slowsteading is a mindset that informs a lifestyle, where people living in towns and cities create a home environment that encourages small-scale gardening and whole food cooking, and where creativity and joy are cultivated, all of it made possible by a decluttered home and a decluttered mind, and kept within the capacity of the household that lives it.

Most mornings at Rosemary Road begin with bread, mixed at six o'clock while the house is still quiet, and by the time the loaves come out of their cast iron pots there is enough for the children's lunch and the next morning's toast. Outside, the traffic on the main road never really stops and there is nearly always a building site somewhere nearby, but none of that has ever kept the bread from rising. I live in a big city with a full house and a full calendar, and I have no farm and no plans to buy one. What I do have is a way of relating to the life I already live, at a pace and a size that this full household can actually carry, and it is this that I call urban slowsteading.

Chickens foraging in a city garden at Rosemary Road

Mindset first

A mindset before it is a lifestyle

People often assume that slowsteading is homesteading on a smaller scale, a few chickens and a vegetable patch squeezed into a suburban garden, but it is not. Homesteading is about land and self-sufficiency, while urban slowsteading begins somewhere else entirely, in the way you think about your home and what you allow to fill it.

The garden and the bread are what it looks like from the outside, but the mindset comes first, and it is the mindset that makes the lifestyle possible in a busy urban life. I cannot supply all the food my family needs, and I do not try to. What I can do is become a fulfilled and contented steward of my household, right here in the middle of the city. Knowing what my household can carry, and choosing within it, is part of that stewardship rather than a limit on it.

Capacity

Room to carry it

Clutter is very rarely the real problem in a home, however much it looks like one. A cupboard that will not close, a diary with no white space left in it, a garden full of half-finished projects and a head that is still running through tomorrow's list at midnight are all signs of the same thing, a life running at the very edge of what it can carry.

That is what I mean by capacity, the time and energy a household really has to give, which changes with every season of family life. I learnt it the hard way as a young mother and caregiver, when exhaustion forced me to rethink what I was asking of myself and of the people around me. Since then I have come to believe that slowsteading does not work when it is piled on top of a life that is already full, and that it only takes root once there is room for it.

Decluttering makes that room, in the home and in the mind, and capacity decides what goes into it. A household with a newborn, a household caring for an ageing parent, a household of teenagers writing exams and a household of one will each carry a very different slowstead, and every one of them is the real thing.

Capacity is not a fixed amount either, since it grows as skills become second nature and shrinks in a hard week, and a slowstead that is honest about both will last far longer than one built for the best week of the year.

Why urban

Why urban

Most of us are not going anywhere, because our work, our children's schools, our families and our friendships keep us in the city, and waiting for a farm that may never come means waiting for a life that could have started years ago. Being in a reality you cannot leave does not mean you cannot dream. Urban slowsteading is not a dream that takes you away from your reality, but one that creates satisfaction and joy inside it. In the city it is seldom the size of the garden that runs out first, but the hours and the energy left at the end of the day, which is why capacity sits at the heart of urban slowsteading.

The five pillars

How urban slowsteading works

There is no formula, and I try to stay away from one, but there are five pillars that describe how urban slowsteading works.

  1. 01

    Dream

    Dreaming is usually understood as something you do in your head, with a vision board and a plan. I have found that it works the other way around, and that small activities are what spark a dream that can then grow. A batch of scones or a few pots of replanted herbs is very often where it begins.

  2. 02

    Declutter

    Most people think of decluttering as clearing out cupboards. I have come to believe it starts with decluttering thoughts, relationships, expectations and goals, which creates the mental space that makes the physical decluttering far more effective when it comes, and shows you honestly how much your life has room for.

  3. 03

    Design

    Design brings the mental and the physical together into a drawing board for your own version of this life, sized to your own capacity, which will never be a copy of mine or of anyone else's.

  4. 04

    Develop

    This is where the skills grow, whether that means learning to bake a good loaf or to preserve a glut of fruit, one small thing at a time, until it becomes part of who you are.

  5. 05

    Do

    This is living it, at a pace you can keep, and somewhere in the doing you stop performing slowsteading and simply start doing it.

The pillars are numbered only for the sake of explaining them. In real life they happen all at once, so you may well be dreaming of a new project while you are still learning to bake a decent loaf. Every new project starts the whole cycle again in miniature, which means you can be a beginner in one pillar and well practised in another.

The eight areas

Areas to choose from, never a checklist

The nearest I will come to suggesting structure is the areas of urban slowsteading that have enriched my life immeasurably. They are areas to choose from, never a checklist or a sequence, and one of them is more than enough to begin with. Your capacity, rather than your enthusiasm, is the best guide to how many you take on at once.

  • Relationship and community

    which at our house looks like the Sunday evening when everybody drifts into the kitchen for toast and tea around the island, a full stop at the end of the weekend that nobody planned or discussed and everybody keeps

  • Cooking

    whole food meals made from what the season and the market give you

  • Baking

    the family favourite cake that comes out for every birthday, or wholegrain rusks baked on repeat

  • Preserving

    green fig preserve every November and bottles of peppadews to share with a friend

  • Gardening

    which for me began with a few seeds in the ground and no garden plan at all

  • Pets and animals

    the chickens that have spoilt us for store-bought eggs

  • Hobbies and crafts

    a crochet dishcloth made in ten minutes on the couch

  • Apothecary and the making of natural products

    herb tinctures and tonics made from what grows in the garden

A lemon growing in a home garden

The name

Where the name comes from

I began using the words urban slowsteading in 2022 to describe the life I was building at Rosemary Road, because neither of the words that already existed fitted it. Slow living described the mindset but left out the soil, and homesteading described the soil but assumed a farm. Urban slowsteading has since become the way I describe everything I write here, in the blog and in the weekly newsletter, and this page is where I keep its definition.

How to begin

Start small and within your capacity

Start small and within your capacity, with something your hands can do today, like a pot of herbs on the windowsill or a new recipe for supper. My free guide, Slowsteading in 10 Minutes, is full of activities that each take less than ten minutes, because I believe your hands wake a dream long before your head catches up with it.

If you would like to keep me company along the way, the newsletter arrives every Wednesday afternoon. And if anything I share ever adds to your mental and technological clutter, you should not follow me. As long as what we share enthuses and energises you, it has a place at the table.

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Urban Slowsteading™ is a term and philosophy created by Renata Roberts. © Renata Roberts, since 2022. You are welcome to use the term in your own writing, with credit to Renata Roberts and a link to this page.