Lindsay Brown: The Lost History of Vancouver's UN Habitat Forum

Vancouver hosted an important, large-scale global event in 1976, yet most Vancouverites know little or nothing about it. It was at the time the largest meeting the United Nations had ever held and the first ever global meeting on the problem of housing in the world's growing cities, both in the West and in the developing world. Out of the conference came The Vancouver Declaration, the founding document of the agency still known today as UN Habitat. The conference also included a massive public 2-week event called Habitat Forum, which was hosted at Jericho Beach in five vintage art deco military hangars. The Forum welcomed NGOs from around the world as well as Buckminster Fuller, Mother Teresa, Margaret Mead, Margaret Trudeau, architect Paolo Soleri and many others in the new fields of sustainable architecture and housing rights. Vancouver writer Lindsay Brown, who is currently completing a book on the Habitat Forum, presented a picture of this lost moment in Vancouver's history, featuring stories and unseen photographs from the archive.