Author: Lindsay Brown

Publisher: Black Dog Pub Limited

Published: 2018-08-07

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781910433171

Habitat ’76 is an illustrated history of the founding conference of UN Habitat in Vancouver in the mid 1970s, with a particular focus on the conference’s free public component known as Habitat Forum. That first UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements attracted to Vancouver a who’s who of international thinkers on settlements and cities including Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller, Mother Teresa, economist Barbara Ward and utopian architect Paolo Soleri, along with politicians such as Pierre Trudeau and Bogota’s famous mayor Enrique Peñalosa. Habitat Forum, designed for activists, NGOs and the general public, was simultaneously deemed an out-of-control hippie gathering and “the official suicide of the counterculture.” Though the Forum had the official UN stamp, suggesting that it was an officially sanctioned substitute for the type of informal protest camp seen at the UN Environment conference in Stockholm in 1972, Habitat Forum was anything but the polite, professionalized urbanist conferences we see today. While the official governmental conference downtown was bogged down by the Israel-Palestinian question, Habitat Forum brought together activists and major thinkers from all over the world in a casual, freewheeling and sometimes fractious environment. It was a catalyzing moment for those who attended, inspiring and influencing their work for decades after. In Habitat ’76 Vancouver writer, designer and civic activist Lindsay Brown tells the story of Habitat Forum: the citizens who circumvented government to make it happen, the many players who participated, and the complex yet little known legacy it left behind. Including hundreds of photographs never before published and interviews with dozens of the original organizers and attendees, the book is the first history of this event. The extensive photo archive in Habitat ’76 details for the first time how in only five months, five vintage military seaplane hangars on Vancouver’s Jericho beach were refurbished into welcoming public spaces by an 11,000-strong army of artists, architects, unemployed youth, students, ex-cons and volunteers in an early feat of DIY recycling and adaptive reuse. Documentation of the site and its construction will interest designers and event organizers alike, while sections on the presentations and discussions that took place there will interest anyone who cares about human settlements. Forty years on, Habitat ’76 provides not only a history of a specific event but a more general picture of the tumultuous 1970s in Vancouver and beyond. The approaches and discourses of that time—optimistic, utopian, imaginative—perhaps merit reconsideration now. Cities now face challenges similar to those already looming in the 1970s, but those challenges have intensified, and Habitat ’76 provides an instructive counterpoint to the contemporary version of urbanism.