Habitat I – Audiovisual Archive

The extensive Habitat I Audiovisual Archive – now on YouTube – is comprised of over 250 recordings of the Habitat I Conference plenary sessions, press conferences, Habitat I Forum, as well as the official Habitat I Audiovisual collection made up of films submitted to the Conference by attending states about their local human settlements issues and interventions (“audiovisual presentations”). The process of creating this material for Habitat I was a herculean effort, the remarkable story of which is detailed in the Habitat I – Process section of this website as well as in documents provided by James (Jim) Carney on the Habitat I – Document Archive page under section header “Documents relating to AV Presentations”. Below are a selection of sample videos from the YouTube channel.

Subtitles in a wide range of languages are available for all videos on the YouTube channel using the closed caption and settings buttons on the video player. Video in U-matic tape format of this material is held at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Archives in Vancouver, Canada and in film at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) in Ottawa, Canada – see the Archival Sources section in the About page of this website for more details. For the Habitat Conferences Digital Archive YouTube Channel, project staff collaborated with UBC Archives and Lifetime Heritage Films to digitize 182 audiovisual presentations created by participating countries and 62 official Conference sessions. In addition, the following material held at LAC was also digitized: the Conference’s Opening Ceremonies, speeches by Margaret Mead and Barbara Ward (Lady Jackson), the Vancouver Symposium press interview, and a speech on nuclear energy.