1976:

After months of preparation, and considerable media discussion, Habitat – the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements - officially opens in Vancouver, with an address by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

“We have entered, willingly or otherwise, the era of a community of interest, vital to the survival of the species,” Trudeau tells the assembled delegates. “No nation can afford to isolate itself in self-contemplation, clasping to its breast its possessions in denial to others.”

The conference, billed as “one of the most important conferences of the U.N.” by Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, has a number of broad goals, chief among them, “solving settlement problems.”

“The world community is fully aware that living conditions and patterns of human settlement are not satisfactory at all in most parts of the world,” Waldheim tells the delegation. “If something is not done and done quickly, the situation will deteriorate dramatically.”

“In most countries, there is enough to fulfill basic needs,” adds Habitat Secretary General Enrique Penlosa. “But in most countries a minority is overusing resources and there is not enough left to meet the minimal needs of the majority[...] The new style will provide for the minimum needs of everyone.”

A number of committees are assembled, meeting in conference rooms across the city, representing the first time the international community has met to discuss the challenges of an increasingly urbanized world. Years of work have been put into defining and refining the issues to be discussed, and the conference draws all manner of interested parties to Vancouver, even giving birth to an unofficial “Habitat Forum”, whose organizing committee, the Vancouver Symposium, includes noted anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Unfortunately, despite its lofty goals and broad aims, the Habitat conference will ultimately be a dismal failure, being hijacked by political interests, and transformed instead into a forum for both the Israel-Palestine question, and a voting bloc of Third World countries known as the Group of 77. Despite being largely progressive, the final statement of principles, known as the Vancouver Declaration, will be viewed as a disaster by the international media, and, due to its implicit support for an equally disastrous anti-Semitic U.N. resolution passed one year earlier (also thanks to the Group of 77), not a single First World country at the conference will vote in the document’s favour.

The organization U.N - Habitat, which is born from the conference, will go on to do very little in the ensuing decades, finally receiving an overhaul in the 1990s.

 

IMAGE: Arthur Erickson’s “Paper Pavilion”, assembled in Vancouver Courthouse Square (now the Art Gallery) for the Habitat Conference.