Thanks to everyone who came out for the May 6 “Jane’s Walk” at Jericho Beach. We walked in the footsteps of Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Maggie & Pierre Trudeau and many others who met at Jericho Beach in 1976 to talk about affordable housing and livable cities. More information here.
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To all those who joined the prior walking tour–”Artists Walking Home” event at the Habitat Forum site on April 14–thank you! We walked on a very sunnny Saturday and had a great time. Visit the Artists Walking Home site for more information about the interesting things they do.
Happy 35th Birthday, Habitat!
Habitat Forum, and its parent event the United Nations Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, took place in Vancouver, Canada from May 31-June 11, 1976. The conference was also known as “Habitat I” and it provided the foundation for the United Nations’ agency known as UN-Habitat, which was officially founded two years later in 1978. The conference was attended by one of the founders of the field of sustainable development, Barbara Ward, as well as Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, Maggie and Pierre Trudeau, among many others.
The year 2011 marks Habitat’s 35th anniversary, which also happens to fall on Vancouver’s 125th birthday. For those of us who were in many ways formed by Habitat, this is a good year to look back on the legacy that Habitat left for Vancouver and its citizens. Despite the fact that Vancouver’s beautiful vintage moderne hangars were demolished after Habitat, the event’s legacy still lives on in subterranean yet influential ways. Were you at Habitat? Please leave comments here.
Note: 2011 always marks Greenpeace’s 40th birthday! The massive international organization was born in Vancouver, and many of its early founders were involved in Habitat. In fact, famous anti-whaling expeditions were launched off the Jericho Wharf at the Habitat site in 1975 and 1976. Habitat ended June 11, 1976, and that weekend, June 12-13, Greenpeace ran benefit concerts and the launch from the decorated hangars. You can read about this in Rex Weyler’s book Greenpeace: How a Group of Ecologists, Journalists, and Visionaries Changed the World. Happy Birthday, Greenpeace.
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The UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, also known as Habitat I was at that time the largest conference the UN had ever assembled. It was the first time the world community ever met to discuss the growing challenges of urbanization, the accelerating human migration from rural to urban areas, urban problems including clean water, sanitation, poverty and homelessness, as well as the nascent field of sustainable urban design.
This site is part of a long book research project on Habitat Forum and the larger UN Habitat Conference by writer Lindsay Brown. The site exists as a means to both share a portion of the growing Habitat archive and to encourage the community to contribute their own Habitat materials—memories, stories, photographs, film, memorabilia—in the service of producing a comprehensive public memory of this formative event. If you would like your material to be part of the book, and be credited in it, or better yet interviewed for it, please contact me.
Please leave your memories and comments here. Positive or negative – it’s all welcome.
The full extent of the archive won’t be shown here—it will be collected in the book—but keep checking back for new additions. Thank you for your interest in Habitat.
Above: Habitat Forum’s theatre was a vintage seaplane hangar transformed by a massive mural designed by renowned Haida artist Bill Reid. The building, along with the four other hangars refurbished for Habitat, was demolished by 1980.
Above: Not strictly part of Habitat Forum, but clearly consistent with its spirit, was the environmentally friendly Paper Pavilion by Arthur Erickson for Habitat. A very early example of paper architecture, the pavilion’s papier mache panels were made by Vancouver schoolchildren and then assembled into this structure on the Vancouver Courthouse’s North plaza (now the Vancouver Art Gallery).