Roberts’s readings are both original and politically engaged. She deftly combats charges that Rohinton Mistry’s refusal to represent his “host” country in spite of the accolades it’s bestowed upon him—to “pay up”— makes him a bad guest. Drawing parallels between Mistry’s representations of political disenfranchisement in India and his public excoriation of cuts to social-welfare programs under Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” Roberts makes the case for the political efficacy of a cosmopolitan citizenship that stands in two places at once.

Digressions like Roberts’ discussion of the idiosyncrasies of Canadian film distribution in her chapter on Carol Shields are less carefully considered. And provocative as the book is in tracing the delicate steps of writers such as Michael Ondaatje, granted honorary citizenship for works that needle the nation now hailing him as its own, its shifts from literary analysis to reception history can be jarring. Still, this is an important study—a smart look at border-crossing books about border crossing that is attentive, as Roberts says about Yann Martel, to the “radically simultaneous” potential of Canadian identities.

A lack of good statistics on the scope of Calgary's homeless population have hampered efforts. Creative Commons photo by Flickr User C Law.

Three years ago, the City of Calgary adopted a 10-year plan to end homelessness. The much-lauded, and now much-copied, program was the first of its kind in Canada. Funded by the provincial government and led by the Calgary Homeless Foundation, the plan hinges on an ambitious “Housing First” strategy, which promises to move 1,800 of Calgary’s homeless population out of shelters and into their own apartments. No more than 10 percent of that population will return to homelessness, it pledges, and by 2018 no one will stay in an emergency shelter for more than a week before permanent housing is found. But does the golden-on-paper policy shine in practice?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say. The City of Calgary has not taken a homeless count since May 2008, when the tally hit 4,060. This leaves no solid way to measure the plan’s progress. While the foundation has launched its own system to keep track of the population, it will be December before there’s an official number. The foundation does know that, as of January, 2,300 people had been moved into their own apartments, says Tim Richter, President and CEO. However, it’s difficult to determine whether others have replaced them, or even if they’re still living in housing.

Kristen Desjarlais-deKlerk, a former frontline worker at The Mustard Seed, an emergency shelter in downtown Calgary, is one of many who would like to see more emphasis on a “Housing First, with support” approach, including frequent visits from caseworkers, treatment for illnesses and addictions and life-skills assistance—services that are not always delivered with the necessary frequency and consistency now.

“We need to find a way to build a sense of community into these Housing First initiatives,” she says. Otherwise, risk factors that contribute to homelessness in the first place aren’t being addressed.

The program largely relies on the Calgary Housing Company to pay subsidies equivalent to 70 percent of the client’s rent. But what happens if the subsidy funding pool runs dry, and people are living in apartments they can’t afford with no skills and no support?

There are plenty of questions surrounding the plan’s long-term goals, and for now, not many answers. Even so, Calgary has started a necessary conversation. “The wonderful thing about the 10-year plan is that it put homelessness back on the agenda,” says Desjarlais-deKlerk, “And made it something that people saw as solvable and worth their time.”

Then Ismail joins a writing class at the University of Toronto where he meets Fatima, a girl the age his daughter would have been, who also belongs to his Indian Muslim community. When Fatima’s parents kick her out because they learn she’s queer, Ismail’s near-empty house presents a convenient (if not entirely comfortable) solution. Meanwhile, Celia, a recent widow, moves into the house across the street. Celia, battling her grief and her Portuguese community’s strict rituals of widowhood, finds herself drawn to Ismail. Ismail, who mostly shuns (and is shunned by) his neighbours in Little Portugal, finds he’s less fractured in Celia’s company. As Ismail’s relationship with the two women deepens, his demiexistence gradually fills with ripe, rewarding chaos.

With a quiet, inward-looking analysis of Ismail’s life, Farzana Doctor‘s Six Metres of Pavement asks how mourning can make way for grief when it’s cemented in by guilt, and if memories can be defanged. Simmering in the background is a remarkable portrait of immigrant Toronto. As an Indian in a Portuguese neighbourhood, Ismail is a double immigrant, and the narrative marks the myriad ways Ismail experiences the city as insider-yet-chronic outsider. With this second novel, Doctor confirms her adeptness at burrowing deep beneath the surface of things—and her gift for relating her findings with humour and grace.

Dear Katie,

I woke up with a lingering vision of my Aunt Agnes’s swollen feet propped on her filthy coffee table. They looked like two puff pastries stuffed into once pastel blue slippers, now the colour of a graying robin’s egg. Aunt Agnes smoked like a tire yard on fire. When I was a child it seemed she ate nothing but bridge mix. She drank sherry from a highball glass. We kids were offered warm tap water in Styrofoam cups that she rewashed and used only when we came around, the rims worried with eight-year-old teeth. This was my introduction to single living.

I left Tom a few hours ago. I’ve been thinking of you and your apartment in the city. I know you say it’s too expensive and your neighbours are always yelling obscenities through the floor, but I’ve been dreaming of moving in with you. Going to the market to buy an apple, just for myself. When I’m standing at the Fiesta Farms with a bag of apples—because Tom eats one a day, every day, cut into quarters—I dream about that single apple. I rip into the plastic bag with a finger and isolate one, hold it like a bowling ball, and lift my curled hand above all the other groceries in the cart. I see it as clearly as I saw my Aunt Agnes’s feet this morning. At first, I couldn’t picture anything but her feet, not until I willed my eyes up to see her face, the lines gathering around her lips like a tightly pulled seam. Cigarette held in her puckered lips.

Yesterday at work, I was holding a white ceramic bowl hot from the microwave. It was balanced in both of my hands like I was holding somebody’s head still and with love. I was staring at my computer screen, at an Excel file stacked heavily with numbers and letters. I didn’t want to look down into the warm bowl because I feared that it might be filled with blood. I glanced down at it. I knew there would be no blood in it, and I was right. Lentil soup. But every time I lifted the spoon, I had that thought. The soup even changed in flavour. Like metal, similar to the taste that erupts when you pull the tip of your tongue from away from a frozen, metal surface.

I threw the soup away and shrugged it off. I had a deadline to meet. You know how Sherry gets, sucking in her teeth and orbiting around your cubicle in those ugly black turtlenecks, pretending to look distracted, eyes burrowing holes into your head. She still talks about you, like you’re friends or something. Asks how you’re doing all by yourself in the big city. I say you’ve gone off with a biker. She always believes me for a second, cause she doesn’t really get sarcasm. I say you’re great, starring in a play, etc. All those things that you do. It’s amazing, Katie. I’m so proud of you. Sherry smiles, but I can tell she’s jealous of you, and jealous of me for being your friend, and staying in touch even after you quit.

There’s a new girl at work whose entire family was killed. I do not think suffering ennobles. But I watch her when she smiles. It’s like she knows something I can’t. She spends all day looking at the horoscopes.

Last night I slept at the office. I stayed behind to work on something and told Sherry I’d lock up and I just never left. I slept on the scratchy paisley couch in the break room and ate everyone’s leftover lunches for dinner. I snooped in Sherry’s desk drawers. You won’t believe what I found in them. I’ll tell you when I get to your place. I hope it’s okay to stay with you. I just can’t go home, you know. Not even to get my things. My things weigh me down. Do you know what I bought last week? Stuff off the TV. Tom will be so mad when he gets the Visa bill.

I called Tom from the office and said I was staying over. He thought I’d gone mad or that I was lying, that I was really having an affair—but I took a photo on my phone and it showed him where I was. He said I must be going really crazy this time and that he was on his way to get me. I told him not to. I wasn’t surprised when I saw his face on the intercom video screen, his time-delayed voice of concern begging me to buzz him in. I had no choice really, I had to tell him it was over. IT’S JUST NOT WORKING OUT, I said, pressing the talk button on the intercom. GO HOME. He just kept saying LET ME IN, over and over, until I turned away, went back to the break room and turned up the volume on the TV. I watched the cooking channel and feel asleep. When I woke up, a half hour ago, he was gone. It’s dawn now and the sun is coming up over the industrial park. I can see the early bird cars on the highway curling around the overpass. I’m going to have to hide under my desk soon when the cleaners come. That, or act like nothing is weird. I just came in really early. I’m a keener. You know.

Love, Mary

Dear Katie,

Remember when we were 12, and we used to read all the dirty parts from Judy Blume’s Forever into a tape recorder so we could listen to them later in bed? How did we even come up with that? Then you’d talk about wanting to be a star on Broadway in New York City, and I was going to be the next Judy Blume. Seems ridiculous now, doesn’t it?

There’s still that sign above the photocopier that Tom made when we all worked together. The one that reads, “Flaubert never wasted a word. Why waste a sheet of paper?” Underneath it I scrawled “Oh, and no need to talk down to us, either,” I added a smiley face too. It was funny when I wrote it. I can’t even tell you how much that sign bugs me now. It’s a daily reminder that I once graduated with an English degree. That I was the first one in my family to graduate from college, and that 13 years later it still doesn’t mean shit. My brothers make $85,000 a year in jobs they only needed trade school for. I make $27,000 a year take-home. That sign reminds me that Tom started out as my employee, and then got promoted, and promoted and then headhunted out of here. And I’m still here. Middle-Management Mary. Sherry got drunk at the Christmas party and said I won’t ever get promoted because James thinks I’m just going to end up getting pregnant again soon. Jesus, Katie, sometimes those family photographs up in everyone’s cubicle are enough to make me want to weep.

I had to fire a girl in customer service a few weeks ago. I could tell she thought she was so much better than me, than this whole office. She had a streak of blue in her blonde hair. She wore Fluevog shoes, so I know she has rich parents, right? She published a book of poetry on the internet. An e-book. Whatever. We logged her internet hours and you wouldn’t believe how little work she did. I said, we don’t pay you to chat. I’m sure they’ll hire her back as our Social Media Manager or some bullshit in a few months, especially since she has great tits, but until then, I got to fire her and I tell you something, firing people used to make me cry. I cried every time. Not this time. I felt energized. Take your smug little scarf you wear in 30 degree weather, your third generation granny boots, your pop culture blah blah blog, and go back to your mother’s basement suite in Brantford, little one.

I didn’t say that, of course.

It’s almost noon, and I just bought my train ticket. Thanks for the invitation to your opening night. I will definitely be there. I’m just waiting for pay day.

Love, M

Dear Katie,

I’m so glad we connected on Facebook. Your photos are so awesome: I love the one with you smoking under the bridge wearing that evening gown. I gave up smoking years ago when I was pregnant with Maggie. I started again when she died, but I only smoked until the funeral. I just didn’t enjoy it anymore anyway. Or anything else, really. Has it been three years already? It still seems like yesterday. That week you let me sleep on your couch was so important to me. I know you know that. I remember how glad I was when Tom came to get me, though. Back when I still loved him. I know you say you’re lonely sometimes, and you’re tired of never finding the right guy, but you have no idea how lucky you are. I’d rather have a gay best friend and a book club and three day benders (great photo of you singing shirtless karaoke!) than the same night every night, that thick silence of two people who have given in to growing old. Tom started playing golf. Do I even need to expand?

Love, M

Dear Katie,

Thanks for letting me stay for at least a little while. I totally understand that it’s not a great time for me to move in. I get it. Maybe I can get a place in your building? And don’t worry, you know how clean I am. I won’t leave a trace! We can run your lines together. I can help you with your costumes. Really, I can’t wait to just sit still in a café and watch people. I used to love doing that I went to U of T. Remember that place in Kensington Market? I still dream I’m there sometimes. Is it still there, Moon-something? I can’t believe my two most incessant daydreams involve buying myself an apple, and watching people while drinking a cup of really good coffee. I am so sick of Tim Hortons I could cry some mornings.

Love, M

Dear Katie,

I’m not sure what to tell you. I came in to work this morning, after a terrible sleep at the Comfort Inn across the highway the office and security was waiting to greet me at the door. Apparently Sherry caught on to my expense account scheme. I may have skimmed a few dollars here and there, but seriously, no promotions ever? I only took what I was worth. It’s bullshit. I can’t even tell you how mad I am. I’m slamming on the keys here in the Comfort Inn business centre. I’ll be out of here today, Katie. I hope you don’t mind that I arrive a bit early. Tom wants me to come home, I know. Lena told him where I am and he’s been sitting in the van in the parking lot for an hour now. I can see him from across the little window, he’s been going to my room and knocking, I suppose. I guess that’s love, right? Or craziness. I’m not sure how I’ll get my stuff. Maybe I’ll just show up with nothing? I’m afraid to see him.

When I see Tom in person, I know I won’t stand my guard. He’s just so safe. I’ll walk towards him because I’ll have no control over my body. Bodies crave security. It’s like when you’re freezing to death and you just go on autopilot doing things to get warm, like shivering. Your body tricks you. My body will open the van door, and slide into the front seat, and he’ll say, “How about a pizza, my best girl?” and then I’ll be 68, in a matching recliner next to his, and we’ll be watching some awards show. You’ll be getting a lifetime achievement award, and I’ll be getting him a beer from the cooler between us. And that will be my whole life.

Love, M

Photographs by José Luis Aranda

The Wirikuta mountain range in the Chihuahua desert in central Mexico. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

Under a heavy afternoon sun, the desert landscape in central Mexico lays long into the horizon, interrupted only by railroad tracks, roadrunners racing beside cars, and every once in a while, a cluster of houses and shops. But towards what some consider the sacred heart of the desert, new features begin to emerge: new age hippies and fellow travellers compete for rides on the side of the road, and in the distance, a dramatic mountain range rises from the plane.

Stretching from Arizona to San Luis Potosí, the Chihuahuan desert wraps around two of Mexico’s largest mountain ranges, laying claim to over 450,000 square kilometers of territory. While at first glance the topography might appear dry and barren, it is in fact home to a fifth of the world’s species of cacti, as well as a host of birds and other creatures.

But there’s one plant in particular that’s an essential part of the region’s draw: peyote. A small, circular cactus, divided into sections that look like a light green cross section of a mandarin orange, it pushes its way out from under the hard dry earth, sometimes into the direct sun, other times under the sparing shade of gobernadora plants.

In the southern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert is an area known as Wirikuta, a sacred site for the Huichol people. Every year, hundreds of Huichol people, whose name for themselves in their own language is Wixáritari, leave their communities in Jalisco, Nayarit and other parts of Mexico and begin a pilgrimage to Wirikuta.

“For us it’s like a temple,” says Marciano de la Cruz Lopez of Wirikuta. He’s one of the few Huichols making a home in the small, mining-cum-tourist town of Real de Catorce.

Wirikuta’s 140,000 hectare site was recognized by the state government as a Natural Protected Area and Sacred Site in 2000. It also includes a 146-kilometre path through the landscape named the Historic Route of the Wixárika People. In 1998, UNESCO declared Wirikuta as one of the world’s 14 natural sacred sites in need of protection.

“It’s a sacred site where we can leave our offerings when we do ceremonies there in the mountains, or when the pilgrims come,” says de la Cruz. “It means everything to us, as Huichol people.”

Alberto Hernandez Gonzales, a Huichol guardian of Wirikuta. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

The Huichols are among the few indigenous groups in Mexico who were never successfully converted to Catholicism by Spanish colonizers, and their fidelity to their traditions is celebrated throughout the country. “I congratulate all of you, the traditional governors, the Wixárica union from the ceremonial centres of Jalisco, Durango and Nayarit, to all of you, for defending these holy places, these marvellous places,” President Felipe Calderón said in a 2008 speech, while dressed in a traditional Huichol pullover and feathered hat.

Huichols believe that Cerro del Quemado, the stunning mountain range that rises from Wirikuta, is the birthplace of the sun and of all life. At the mountain’s summit is a structure where the Huichols leave offerings of thanks as part of their ceremonies: feathers, arrows, water from sacred springs, and other precious objects.

But this historic spiritual site is now at risk, its ancient landscape threatened by modern industry. And for the Huichol people, the stakes couldn’t be higher: the prospect of mining for silver under their holy mountain not only endangers the safety of their water supply; it represents a spiritual affront. Imagine drilling for oil under the Vatican, or bulldozing Eden to make room for a golf course.

Miners working at the former La Luz mine owned by First Majestic Silver. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

First Majestic Silver, a Vancouver-based mining company, holds a series of concessions that overlap with Wirikuta, and the company’s plans to develop the mine have already been controversial locally and around the world.

First Majestic already owns three producing silver mines, in Durango, Coahuila, and Jalisco, and is preparing to bring a fourth mine online. The project at Real de Catorce is the earliest-stage project the company owns, and they have yet to begin the permit process. If First Majestic receives all the permits needed—which have not yet been acquired—they expect to start producing silver at the property in 2014. Technical studies carried out by the previous owners of the concessions at Real de Catorce indicate that mining the silver laden tailings left over from historic mines combined with opening up new mine shafts in Real de Catorce could net 33 million ounces of silver, as well as substantial quantities of lead and zinc. The company says they’ll employ at least 600 locals by the time production begins, and the mine could operate for as many as 15 years.

The common thread that unites the company and many of those opposed to the project is something that’s sorely lacking in the region: water.

“There’s a limited amount of water here,” says Humberto Fernandez, owner of the Hotel Real, perhaps the most prestigious accommodation in Real de Catorce. “The aquifer here is disappearing,” he says. We met Fernandez and his wife Cornelia over lunch in the restaurant of the hotel that he’s owned and operated for almost 35 years. From the right angle, with his grey hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a green corduroy shirt and a peyote charm on his necklace, Fernandez bears a slight resemblance to Fidel Castro, and he talks a mean streak, too.

“Water is the main cause for concern that we’ve noticed among the local population,” he says, sitting straight up in his chair and talking over a steaming plate of pasta. “There’s been weeks without any water in the village.”

The local aquifer providing what scarce water there is in the region, is classified as “over-exploited” by the National Water Commission. The water problem isn’t new: when the local mines were operating at full tilt in the 19th century, there wasn’t enough water to run a mill in Real de Catorce.

“The water supply is still in the planning phase,” says Todd Anthony, head of First Majestic’s investor relations department, from his office in Vancouver. “but its not going to disrupt any supply to the local community there. We’ve got other plans in mind,” he says. He refused to elaborate on what those possible alternatives might be, however.

Interior of the former Santa Ana mine. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

The anti-mining fight in Wirikuta and Real de Catorce is far from the first flashpoint of resistance against Canadian mining companies in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí. In fact, it is in many ways mirrors a struggle that has been going on in the equally picturesque village of San Pedro. Also a colonial mining town, the Cerro de San Pedro was of such importance in the region that it is featured to this day in the centre of the state’s official emblem.

Except the Cerro de San Pedro hardly exists anymore. Over the past four years, the hill has been blown to pieces and trucked to a cyanide treatment plant. Instead of rising like a tiny, stand alone colonial mecca half an hour by car from the city of San Luis Potosí, San Pedro today is surrounded by growling dump trucks and mountains of cyanide treated waste rock, by-products of a large scale, open pit silver and gold mine operated by Vancouver-based New Gold.

The abundance of new mining projects popping up across Mexico have generated enough problems throughout the country to prompt the creation of a Special Commission for Mining Conflicts in the national congress. Anti-mining activists and industry groups alike trace surge in investment in the mining sector back to the North America Free Trade Agreement.

“To facilitate what’s happening now, the pillaging of our country and the arrival to our country of a large quantity of companies— especially mining companies—it was necessary to have a working free trade agreement,” says Mario Martínez, a spry septuagenarian anti-mining activist from San Luis Potosí. Among the key changes in legislation NAFTA wrought were adjustments to Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution, which defines the legal framework for the ownership of land and the use of natural resources.

But Enrique Flores, an engineer working with First Majestic Silver, says things have changed for the better in the world of mining. I caught up with him on the company-owned hacienda in the village of La Luz, which lies just a few kilometres outside of Real de Catorce. He was animated and talkative, having just returned from a workshop at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City on Corporate Social Responsibility.

“Mining investment is made for profit, but at the same time it provides work for people, and raises the standard of living here,” says Flores, who took the time to show me images of the proposed mining project, pointing out on a map where the company is going to work, and how. “For example, in the case of Canadian mining companies, the government of Canada follows very closely what their companies are doing in other countries,” he says.

But though corporate social responsibility and Canadian government oversight might sound like progress, there are no binding international standards through which Canadian mining companies can be held accountable for their actions around the world, says Jennifer Moore from Canadian mining watchdog group MiningWatch Canada.

This fact didn’t seem to ruffle Flores, who took me on a tour through the historic Santa Ana mine. A few dozen locals are already working for First Majestic to transform the abandoned mine into a museum—part of the company’s promise of long-term jobs to the community. Deep inside the hills, the cool, dark mineshaft widened in places and exposed large galleries that once featured the most upto-date technology in the country. In other places, traces of more primitive mining were visible, sometimes overlaid with red spray paint indicating that there’s still silver in the walls after all these years.

Humberto Fernandez, owner of the Hotel Real and opponent of First Majestic Silver's mining plans. Photo by José Luis Aranda.

Just how sacred is Wirikuta? “Wixárika culture is about living for ceremony, because that is the form of life, there is no other form of living,” says Javier Ignacio Martínez Sánchez, an anthropologist originally from Chiapas who has lived in the heart of Wirikuta, for more than a decade. “It breaks your heart to see how they dance, to see the corn that they come and leave here, or the blood of the deer, how much it took to go hunt it, how much it all takes,” he says.

Martínez cuts an eccentric figure: he pays the rent on the tiny adobe igloo in which he lives by giving massages, and his only possessions are a bed surrounded by musical instruments, a few neat stacks of books, an empty plastic cooler, and a smattering of feathers and other ceremonial items.

With a masters’ thesis on the use of peyote under his belt, Martínez has worked hard to integrate himself into desert society, and to help build links between the Huichol pilgrims and the communal owners of the land they must travel. He’s the first to point out that Huichols’ annual trek through the desert also carries great significance for others living in the area.“The [landowners] here already made the link between the presence of the Huichols and the arrival of the rains,” says Martínez from his perch on the edge of his bed. “They say that when the pilgrims arrive on foot, it meant that there would be a good harvest.”

The use of peyote at the end of the pilgrimage is of supreme importance to the Huichols, who are considered the guardians of the spiritual tradition of peyote use. Only after weeks of fasting and celibacy and a long walk through the desert armed with the blood of a freshly sacrificed deer, can the mythic cactus—more often referred to as “medicine,” or hikuri in the Wixárika language—be consumed.

The fact that there’s mineral wealth under such a special site didn’t come as a surprise to Marciano de la Cruz’s wife, Yolanda. “The shamans always said that where there are sacred things, there are mines,” she interjected, looking up for just a moment from the intricate combination of thread and beads between her fingers.

“Our medicine is like a teacher, because it teaches us many things,” says de la Cruz. While we talked, Yolanda continued with her beading, while his children shifted their attention between a plastic bowling set on the floor and a cartoon on the family’s small television set.

De la Cruz is also among those concerned about impacts on the water from the proposed mining operation, but for a more particular reason. “Here there’s not much water, they say it takes lots of water to wash the rocks in mining, for silver, after they do that the water can run underground and it can contaminate our medicine,” he says. “And then we’re going to eat the medicine, and it could affect us.”

The Huichol people are, of course, not the only ones to take advantage of the powers of peyote. The cactus, which contains the psychedelic alkaloid mescaline, is used by Indigenous peoples throughout the northern part of the hemisphere. The Native American Church is a registered organization in the US whose members have the right to use and transport peyote.

But its use by non-Indigenous people throughout the 1960s and 70s might just be that which has brought the most attention to the sacred plant. Peyote was a cornerstone of the beat generation’s hallucinogenic trips, inspiring part of Allen Ginsberg’s epic Howl, and figuring into the writings of other such as William S. Burroughs and Ken Kesey. Rock stars got in on the game too: Jim Morrison, legendary front man for the popular American rock band The Doors, was known to experiment with peyote.

The cultural legacy of psychedelic art influenced by mescaline still resonates today. Tourists from around the world, inspired by the far-out message of the beat writers, flock to the desert, and to Wirikuta, to sample the effects of the button-like cactus on their own consciousness.

Sol Rak is one such visitor to the region, who has made the trek from his home in Chiapas more than 10 times in order to participate in ceremonies in the mountains that separate Real de Catorce from the desert below. “I love going to Quemado,” says Rak, who travels with fire sticks and a Temascal drum.

But mass cutting and overuse of peyote by outsiders has led to its near extinction in some regions, and it’s forced the Huichol people to set up a system to oversee who enters and leaves Wirikuta.

One of these Huichol look outs is a simple cement house on the edge of Las Margaritas, where Alberto Hernandez Gonzales lives with his wife and two teenage sons. “My job is to be here watching to make sure there is no pillaging [of peyote],” says Hernandez, whose Huichol name is Mukieri Kuayumania, which means “from the feather of an unknown bird.”

The first time we tried to meet with Hernandez he was dead tired, having done a 24 kilometer patrol of the area on foot. He was appointed to the post for a three-year term by a community assembly in his home village. And though he says he’s managed to stop some peyote thieves from entering Wirikuta, he quickly adds that he and guardians like him are severely lacking in resources. There’s only three of them working when there should be six, he says, and he doesn’t even have a mule upon whose back he could more easily safeguard the area.

Under a strong wind that moved through the plastic notches hanging from Hernandez’s traditional hat, he recounted the five points of the Huichol universe from a notebook containing carefully written notes.

“We really need to take care of these sites, they are the historical patrimony of our ancestors,” says Hernandez, referring to the threat posed by First Majestic Silver. “The Wixárika communities don’t want these places to be destroyed.”

Flores, speaking on behalf of the mining company, says First Majestic will do its best to leave the Huichol’s sacred sites alone. “The company is, what do you call it, promising to respect the ceremonial centres of the Huichols,” he says. “In fact in a meeting with the Huichol gentlemen we’re going to propose that they take over this part, and we won’t touch it,” says Flores, pointing his finger onto a section of the map that includes part of Wirikuta.

But company’s claims that they won’t touch Cerro Quemado and will work underground instead of open pit mining don’t comfort Hernandez, who likens Wirikuta to his own body.

“The mountain, in any case, is ourselves,” he says. “Right now we’re alive because we are complete. If someone comes along and splits my stomach open and rips out my insides, I’m no longer alive.”

Photos by Ian Willms

Robert Beynon’s dairy farm sits just north of the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, on one of the southernmost edges of Ontario’s greenbelt. It’s a small operation (40 cows, 350 acres) set back off of busy Bathurst Street. Behind his 150-year-old brick farmhouse and squat green dairy barn stretches a patchwork of bare fields, still muddy in mid-April. It’s the kind of pastoral scene city dwellers naturally think farms look like.

What those urbanites likely wouldn’t picture is what surrounds Beynon’s piece of rural paradise. Across the road, on the east side of Bathurst, sprawls MacLeod’s Landing, a 1,400-unit subdivision of looping streets and oversized homes. Houses bleed north onto former agricultural land—much of which Beynon’s family used to farm. He’d like to expand his property, but it’s boxed in on one side by the development, and on another by land slated to become a cemetery. Besides, he says, “The land’s too expensive, and you wouldn’t want to set up a bigger dairy operation next to a subdivision. Everyone loves the idea of living in the country, but they don’t really want to live beside somebody milking a couple hundred head of cows.” Later he wonders aloud, “And who wants to farm in the city when it comes down to it?”

Beynon is 33 years old; he’s no grizzled old-timer ready to retire. When he was still in school at the University of Guelph, taking a farm operations program, he and his father made plans to move outside of the GTA, away from the already encroaching houses, to buy more land and milk more cows. But in 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine Act became law. (The moraine area’s 470,000 acres run from Brampton to past Cobourg.) The result was strict land-use regulations dictating how farmers could alter or expand their operations. There was also a moratorium on intensive development, but that didn’t stop construction on MacLeod’s Landing; the development was grandfathered because it had been approved before the moraine policy was created. There was no such provision for Beynon, whose family has owned its land for 150 years.

Then in 2005, the provincial government created the 1.8-million-acre greenbelt, which wraps itself around the Golden Horseshoe—running north of Toronto, Hamilton and their suburbs. (The greenbelt also includes the Niagara Escarpment, which bends down from the Georgian Bay to Niagara Falls, and encompasses the environmentally fragile Oak Ridges Moraine, the expanding Rouge Park, and the Holland Marsh.) Beynon claims his property value dropped about 70 percent. Now he and his wife Trina are stuck. “We don’t plan. We can’t justify putting an addition on our farm. And there isn’t more land to rent,” says Beynon, exasperated. “I’m not happy.”

Not that you would know that from his demeanour. Giving me a tour of his farm one April evening last year, he talks constantly, filling up silence and filling in detail. He opens the creaky wooden door to his dairy barn and calls to his big black lab, Jake, to follow him. Inside, his Guernseys chew their cud under the old barn’s low ceilings—the building, constructed around the same time as the farmhouse, has hardly changed in 40 years. “This barn’s dated,” says Beynon, more serious now. “Through the ’90s we were not improving our farm because what’s the point when you’re supposed to move? So we got behind on that and now we’re trying to play catch-up,” he says, explaining that he’s trying to modernize his barn—to make milking and cleaning more efficient— without spending too much money on facilities he still hopes to leave. “But it’s hard to make a business plan when you’re in our situation.” So for now he waits, hoping he finds an opportunity to sell his farm and move his operation out of the GTA.

Other farmers, fed up with the costs, the traffic, and the bureaucracy are doing exactly that, setting out for more open, less regulated, less occupied spaces to the south, east, and north. Some believe a mass exodus is inevitable, and that as agricultural land empties, it will be bought up by wealthy urbanites and made into 100-acre hobby farms. “Little by little, down in the greenbelt, some of those [farms] are going to become big estates. What happens then, to good, quality land?” asks retired veterinarian and dairy farmer Terry O’Connor. The promise of a sustainable, local food source for millions of Ontarians may be thwarted by the very policies designed to foster it.

How did this happen? Despite good intentions, the government made a false assumption about agriculture: just because you save the land doesn’t mean you save the farms. Without a well thought-out provincial agricultural policy implemented along with the greenbelt, those good intentions will remain wishful thinking, or even worse, the death knell for small-scale agriculture in the GTA. If things keep going this way, farmers warn, the future of the greenbelt will be one of large-scale industrial farms and barely productive hobby farms—the worst of both worlds.

“Ontarians will never have to fear that our access to food runs out. Unless we experience a nuclear holocaust, we will always have access to farm-fresh foods.” That’s Burkhard Mausberg, president of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, paraphrased last summer by urban affairs magazine Spacing. “We have our own food basket in our backyard,” he said.

That’s the dream. In 2006, one year after the greenbelt was created, The Globe and Mail reported [PDF] that Municipal Affairs Minster John Gerretsen was happy with the result: the scheme was “strutting its stuff in that it’s curbing urban sprawl, protecting water supplies and ensuring land for food protection.” Four years later, the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume chimed in: “There was much shouting and screaming at the time—most notably from certain developers whose fury knew no bounds—but half a decade later, the wisdom of the move has been widely acknowledged.”

The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is to promote the protected area, boasts on its website that “possibility grows in the Greenbelt,” and claims the area is the most diverse of its kind in the world, both ecologically and agriculturally. It’s certainly one of the largest. At 1.8 million acres, it beats out London U.K.’s 1.2-million-acre swath, B.C.’s 716,000 acres, and the Netherlands’ 395,368.

There’s also no doubt Ontario’s greenbelt has saved land from developers. Conservationists and the public cheered the promise of land staying pristine, frozen in time. In fact, supporters cheered so loudly, they barely heard the grumbling from farmers out in their fields. Farmers weren’t consulted until after the McGuinty government announced the policy, and even then, they claim, no one listened. Agriculture, farmers groused, came second to environmentalism.

While she makes clear that she’s a staunch greenbelt supporter, food journalist Margaret Webb says, “When the local food movement gained momentum a few years ago, my perspective was that no one was really talking about the farmers… I think there was a misunderstanding of how farmers need to make a living.”

“We’re lashing out at the greenbelt because it’s the last insult,” says Niagara-area grape grower Howard Staff. “They should have talked about viability and programs that should have kept farmers in business.”

On the phone from his mid-town Toronto office, Mausberg—a former University of Toronto environmental studies professor and Ivey Foundation environmental director—says need for land protection was dire. “There was enormous growth eating up the land. Every year [in the GTA] we lost the equivalent of 1,200 soccer fields”—about 2,400 acres.

According to University of Toronto researchers Felix Fung and Tenley Conway, Toronto is “one of the fastest growing regions in North America, with the annual population increase exceeding 1.5 percent between 1996 and 2001. It is estimated that an additional 3.7 million people will make the region their home by 2031.” It’s no coincidence the greenbelt was created around the same time as the Places to Grow Act, a province-wide planning program to better manage municipal growth.

The Greenbelt Act itself states that the policy was created “to sustain the countryside, rural and small towns and contribute to the economic viabilities of farming communities;” “to preserve agricultural land as a continuing commercial source of food and employment;” and “to recognize the critical importance of the agricultural sector to the regional economy.”

But nowhere in the act’s 5,000 words does it lay out policies that support agriculture in any concrete way. Farming near an urban area, with its traffic, lack of agricultural infrastructure, and high land prices is difficult and frustrating. Those problems weren’t caused by the greenbelt, but they should be ameliorated by it.

In August 2009, University of Guelph rural-planning professor Harry Cummings and two grad students released a detailed analysis of agriculture in the region. Using census data, they looked at agricultural change from 2001 to 2006 in the greenbelt, and compared it to the rest of Ontario. What they found was that, in those years, the greenbelt area lost 490 farms and 86,000 acres of farmland, and every livestock operation in the region was either experiencing more rapid decline or slower growth than those in the rest of the province. The number of pigs had decreased by 31 percent in the greenbelt versus 14 percent elsewhere in Ontario, and the number of greenbelt beef cattle dropped by 24 percent versus 13 percent. The number of dairy cattle in the greenbelt fell by 13 percent versus 9 percent. (London, England’s greenbelt, created in 1939, faced a similar problem in the mid-1980s. High land prices forced farmers to rent land rather than own, and according to three University College London researchers, the percentage of family-run farms dropped from 45 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1985.)

Mausberg isn’t convinced by Cummings’ research. He says the numbers present a cause and effect relationship between the greenbelt and the flight of farmers that doesn’t actually exist. He calls Cummings’ research shoddy (something he’s even told the researcher himself), explaining that Cummings’ team studied census data from 2006, even though the greenbelt was only implemented the year before. “When you look at animal agriculture, it’s the first to leave when urbanization comes close because the infrastructure for that kind of farming is too far,” he says. “Urbanization is the single largest reason why farmers move, not land-use regulations. If you want to keep livestock agriculture, then you need to grow the greenbelt.”

Cummings, however, believes his conclusions will be borne out when he redoes the study after the 2011 census. “The one thing I want to make clear is I never claim the 2006 data shows the impact of the greenbelt; I’m just showing what happened between 2001 and 2006,” he says. “I hope that in 2011 we’ll see some new agriculture being created in the greenbelt, but that’s not what I hear. In fact, what I hear is the province hasn’t chosen to have any special near-urban agricultural policy.”

While Toronto Regional Conservation Authority planner David Burnett says farmers are exempt from some regulations if there is no alterative (they could, for example, build that shed within 30 metres of the buffer zone for a waterway if there was nowhere else to build it), Cummings says it’s still a burden farmers aren’t able to carry. “Many of the people who are stronger environmentalists than they are agriculturalists haven’t thought of the implications of how we grow our food in a responsible manner and have a green countryside,” he says. “It’s a lack of comprehension about the total picture.”

On a stretch of secluded rural road about a 10-minute drive east of Kitchener lives dairy farmer Ken McNabb, his wife, Marie, and their three boys. I visit one morning in late spring, and McNabb takes me for a tour around his property, showing me the grove of giant, sheltering trees, a backyard swimming hole, and tidy, black-metal-clad barns. This is the alternative Toronto-area farmers are seeking. Marie is baking a batch of muffins when I arrive, and as we all sit at the kitchen table, McNabb, a lean 52-year-old with a kindly, matter-of-fact demeanour, tells me what it was like to move 40 cows, his farm machinery, and all of his family’s household belongings from Georgetown, about 15 kilometres west of Brampton, to New Hamburg: easy. Okay, maybe not easy. The process of packing up and hauling away their entire livelihood was stressful, but McNabb regrets nothing. They don’t have to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic backed-up in front of their house (“You try to teach a 16-year old to get across four lanes of traffic with a tractor and a wagon”); they don’t have to worry about encroaching suburbs. And they can see the stars at night.

Though McNabb’s former property wasn’t inside the greenbelt, he faced many of the same problems farmers there do. He was too far from a lot of farm services like tractor mechanics, stable cleaners, and machinery repair services. And they owned only 88 of the nearly 300 acres they farmed, so he couldn’t expand. But unlike Beynon, McNabb was handed an easy way out. Farmers on either side of the greenbelt say that when the legislation was enacted, it was almost like someone drew an arbitrary line in the soil. It was hard to say why some were encompassed in the protected swath and why some were left out.

The McNabb farm ended up on the south side of the line, in the so-called white belt—land on the Toronto side of the greenbelt left ripe for development—and between April 2004, when he and Marie started thinking about moving, and February 2005, when they sold, the value of his farm nearly tripled, from $1,800 per acre to $5,200 per acre.

McNabb sold his land to a speculator. It’s still being farmed, but will inevitably be developed. While he seems sanguine about his own situation, he’s fatalistic about farming around the Golden Horseshoe. “Eventually everybody has to go. Everybody leaves at a different time for a different reason, but eventually they all have to leave,” he says. “Some tolerate it longer than others. It depends on where they are, who their neighbours are, and what traffic is on the road. But it’s not as easy to pursue agriculture in the greenbelt as it is out where we are.”

About 100 farmers, planners and environmentalists gathered at the Four Points Sheraton in Thorold, Ontario, near St. Catharines, on a Wednesday in March 2010, to talk about the greenbelt. The summit was a makeshift review of the policy, hosted by the Region of Niagara. Local MPPs Tim Hudak and James Bradley were invited, but didn’t show.

The Greenbelt Act won’t be up for official review until 2015, 10 years after it was passed, but farmers here have decided they want to be prepared. “Just because the province can’t review it doesn’t mean we can’t,” says Len Troup, chair of the tender fruit marketing board and one of the summit’s five panelists.

Some, like TRCA planner David Burnett, believe a lot of farmers are mad the greenbelt took away their retirement funds. “They thought that their retirement would be based on selling their farmland to a developer…they feel certain rights were taken away.” But that isn’t the main reason for farmers’ anger. On the contrary, they’re upset by the “browning” of the greenbelt as land slips out of agricultural production. Ultimately, they want the same things as the food activists: viable local agriculture, more access to local markets, and support from their communities and government.

Mausberg was also at the summit in March, and while he believes more conversation is needed among farmers, citizens, and the government, he doesn’t share all of farmers’ sentiments: he thinks they’re focused on the wrong problems. “If we start the conversation with why the greenbelt was terrible and how the government forced it on you, we’re not going to have a dialogue,” he says. “You can sit there and whine about the fact that this happened five years ago, or you can talk about it.”

Even if opposing groups do find common ground on the issue, fixing the greenbelt is going to take more than a simple review. Suggestions of ways to revamp the act read like a long wish list. Foodies like Webb and Toronto-based food writer Sarah Elton, author of the book Locavore, want a food policy; farmers want an agricultural policy—it’s something they’ve been asking for since the beginning. “It’s about time the government came out with a statement to the effect that agriculture is a needed industry in Ontario,” says GTA Agricultural Action Committee chair Peter Lambrick.

“Farmers have to get the sense that they’re actually wanted here and that they can make a living,” says Lambrick. “I think it will come, but whether it will be this generation that does it or the next is what we’re asking now.”

Michel Warchawski standing in Canada Park near Jerusalem. Photo by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours.

Sitting cross-legged in a circle, a group of about 20 Israeli school children are chatting excitedly under the shade of tall pine trees one sunny afternoon in March. A few meters away, the names of hundreds of Canadians are prominently displayed on row upon row of beige, ceramic plaques. Montreal. Toronto. Winnipeg. Vancouver. Welcome to Canada Park.

The Jewish National Fund of Canada built this vast and sprawling national park, just 30 minutes’ drive from Jerusalem, in the early 1970s. The idyllic setting of the park today, however, belies its bitter origins.

Three Palestinian villages—Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba—once stood on this land, now covered in pine trees and narrow, winding hiking trails. But that history has been largely scrubbed from the landscape and Israeli and Canadian memory.

“It’s either ancient times or Israel. There’s nothing in between,” Israeli activist Michel Warschawski tells me, as he stops the car to read a sign in Hebrew marking the site of a Byzantine-era wine press inside the park.

Warschawski was 17 when he witnessed the forced exodus of Palestinians from the three Palestinian villages in June of 1967, during the Six Days War. Palestinian men, women and children marched quietly up the hillside just past the Jewish kibbutz of Sha’alvim where he lived.

Standing inside Canada Park at the edge of a lush, green field, Warschawski pointed towards the red roofs of Sha’alvim in the distance, just beyond what once was the “no man’s land” between Israeli and Jordanian controlled areas from 1948 and 1967.

We continued along the rocky path in silence, him lost in thought and I busying myself with examining the shrubs, trees and overgrown grass under my feet for anything that would hint at the deep Palestinian roots of the area.

Today, more than 40 years after Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba were demolished, a few olive trees, cactuses, and the crumbling stone foundations of old homes are the only indicators of the area’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Ahmad Abu Ghosh was 14 when Israeli soldiers forced him and his family out of their village of Imwas. The villagers weren’t allowed to take any belongings with them, and were told by the Israeli army to march eastward in the direction of what is now known as the West Bank.

“We walked about 32 kilometers that day from 5 o’clock until 5 o’clock p.m. Then we reached Ramallah,” he said. Without a permit to enter Israel, the last time Abu Ghosh visited his family’s former village was 1991.

I had our conversation in mind as I surveyed the broken stones and collapsed former Palestinian homes, which, despite years of erosion and wear, remain the only witnesses to a planned and systematic expulsion of Palestinians from the land where Canada Park now sits.

“If you lived in some place for 14 years, in the childhood time, you have many memories there. Your house, the trees where you go and the fields where you run or walk,” Abu Ghosh told me. “When you see that everything is destroyed, you have to be shocked. I can’t exactly say how I feel.”

Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 20 (Sherbrooke)

@PLDusseault — Canada’s youngest-ever MP, Dusseault, a self-professed “political junkie” who turned 20 on May 31, recently completed his first year in applied politics at l’Université de Sherbrooke. Dusseault campaigned actively and debated Liberal MP Denis Coderre and former-Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe over Twitter. Standing up in the House may be different, but Dusseault is confident. “Maybe some won’t take me seriously in the beginning,” he told Canadian Press, “but I’m ready to work hard and earn my spot.”

Mylène Freeman, 22 (Argenteuil/Papineau/Mirabel)

@MyleneFreeman — This soon-to-be McGill University grad started her political resume working on Thomas Mulclair’s 2008 campaign, and then running for councillor in Montreal’s 2009 municipal election. Fully bilingual, Freeman has worked to engage youth and women in politics. She is the former coordinator of McGill’s “Women in House” program, where young women shadow female MPs in Ottawa for two days.

Matthew Dubé, 22 (Chambly/Borduas)

@MattDube — Co-president of McGill’s NDP group alongside fellow MP-elect Charmaine Borg. The political science student has said he wants to increase federal funding for post-secondary education, especially given Quebec’s announced annual tuition increases of $325 through 2017. On the NDP’s electoral success, he told the McGill Daily: “A lot has been made of the different backgrounds [of the rookie MPs], that we’re somehow less competent. The whole point of democracy is to be representative. People don’t want to elect 308 lawyers.”

Laurin Liu, 20 (Rivière-des-Mille-Îles)

@LaurinLiu — Liu is a history and cultural studies undergrad at McGill. While she did not visit her Rivière-des-Mille-Îles riding during the campaign, she says strengthening connections to her constituents is now top priority. Liu has already criticized the media for ignoring how much energy youth bring to politics, and nailed them for hypocrisy. Why bemoan the dearth of youth in politics, she asked, and then ridicule them when they are elected to Parliament?

Apo-TriAvir, the generic HIV/AIDS drug. A Canadian law making its export easier is likely finished in parliament. Image courtesy Apotex.

In March, Canada came improbably close to establishing a system to deliver drugs cheaply and quickly to poorer countries. In a vote of 172 to 111, the House of Commons passed Bill C-393, which would have streamlined Canada’s Access to Medicine Regime, a program to provide low-cost generic drugs to the global south. It wasn’t to be: the senate stalled, waiting for the vote of non-confidence that precipitated a spring election. That vote came four days later, effectively trashing the bill.

CAMR allows generic drugmakers to export cheaper versions of brand-name drugs to developing countries, without needing the permission of the patent-holders. “We have tremendous capacity to help address a particular need,” says Richard Elliott, executive director at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network. But CAMR’s cumbersome red tape kept manufacturers away. Says Elliott: “To leave in place a regime that is not working would be harming millions of people who need access to medicines.”

The program had only been used once since it was introduced in 2005. In 2007, Apotex, the largest Canadian-owned generic drug company, shipped enough HIV medication, Apo-TriAvir, to treat 21,000 patients in Rwanda [PDF]. Apotex says the final shipment went out in 2008. “We’re not likely to repeat the process under the current regime,” says Bruce Clark, Apotex’s senior vice-president of scientific and regulatory affairs. “It’s not just our decision, it’s a practical reality that no second country has made a request under the regime because it’s so complicated.” Bill C-393 would have simplified that process, but its future looks doubtful.

When C-393 passed in the House of Commons, it was supported by 26 Conservative MPs; 25 of those were re-elected, but the bill’s prospects in the new Conservative-dominated parliament look dim. “We saw what Harper did in the senate with the bill,” Elliott says.

On May 5, Elliott discussed CAMR’s future with other major advocacy groups. They’ve decided it’s not time to give up, but it will take time to re-assess the political climate before drafting some next steps. “The legal landscape is more challenging now than before,” he says. “But it’s worth trying to gather some intelligence and make a more informed assessment as to what the prospects might be before moving forward.”

Even with such slight optimism, Elliott expects the earliest the bill could be re-introduced—if at all—would be this fall.

Interior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

Walk around Vancouver’s Jericho Beach in 2011 and you’ll see some odd architecture: an empty concrete wharf, a welded steel railing that overlooks English Bay, a strange rail embedded beneath the sailing club. These are all that is left of a complex of five gigantic aircraft hangars that was home to an international conference 35 years ago.

Lindsay Brown, a textile designer and board president of Vancouver’s Or Gallery, is working to unearth a forgotten piece of Vancouver’s history: Habitat ’76, a United Nations-sponsored conference that brought together figures like Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, and Mother Teresa, to discuss and explore human living conditions and social justice. She is gathering information towards publishing a book.

An adjunct to the UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements, the Habitat Forum was infused with a distinctly mid-’70s brand of optimism and utopianism. The five huge seaplane hangars, left over from the 1930s, were converted into theatres, halls and restaurants for the thousands of people who attended. The theatre, styled to look like a First Nations longhouse, had a Bill Reid mural.

Brown, a thirteen-year-old girl at the time, visited the Habitat forum and calls it a life-changing experience. “It had a kind of a carnival atmosphere. It had a less controlled atmosphere than the city generally had. People call it ‘No Fun City’ now. When you’re thirteen, you don’t exactly know what’s going on, but it had that feeling of ideas and experimentation as well as fun. It was so beautiful.”

Exterior of one of the Habitat ’76 hangars. Image courtesy Lindsay Brown.

She was impressed with the ferment of artistic and political ideas and creativity at Habitat, in contrast to the staid conservatism she experienced in the rest of the city. “You did get the sense you were in a global event rather than the sort of parochial Vancouver I’d been used to.”

Years later, Brown never forgot about Habitat. She would Google it now and then, but was often frustrated that little or nothing turned up. Habitat seemed to have been forgotten. In 2009, she decided that if nobody else would write a book about it, she would.

Brown managed to track down Al Clapp, Habitat’s organizer and a prominent broadcaster. ““I said, ‘Hi, I’m a child of Habitat. I want to write about it. Can we talk?’ He said, ‘Sure. I’m in Victoria. Come on over.’” Brown visited Clapp, who loaned her his archive of photos and other material. “That’s when I knew there was a book in it.”

Brown says that, unlike Expo ’86, Habitat ’76 was deliberately buried by Vancouver’s city government. “It’s very hard to keep a history alive when you have absolutely zero public, official recognition of it. I think it was deliberately suppressed.” The aircraft hangars were demolished and the 35th anniversary came and went with little fanfare.

More than just nostalgia, Brown believes that Habitat’s ideals are increasingly relevant today with the renewed focus on urban planning. “One of the interesting things about Habitat is that it thought about those things, what is actually livable at a human level? What should neighbourhoods and cities be like?”