Intrigued about 'People's Habitat: a festival of Alternative Living' which took place in Rotherhithe in May/June 1976. According to the magazine Undercurrents (June 1976) it was to be 'an all embracing adventure into what the alternative society could be, given a chance'. It was intended to be a counter festival to the United Nations Habitat Conference taking place at the time in Vancouver.
This issue of the magazine included a series of articles on the People's Habitat theme, claiming that in contrast to the Vancouver event. 'At People's Habitat we ordinary mortals will be coming together to work out how we can wrest control of our living and working environments away from those, both capitalist exploiters and paternalist bureaucrats, who have stolen our freedom. We will be exploring new ways of living and working co-operatively with, and for, each other in harmony with the rest of the natural world'
Not sure how it actually went, there was a less than effusive review in Freedom anarchist paper (26 June 1976) which described its best feature as a windmill aiming 'to pump water to the allotments on the filled in Surrey Docks'
I believe Clifford Harper designed the poster for the event.
Anyone know any more about it?
The Clifford Harper illustration is called Collectivised Gardens from 1974. He mentions in Education of Desire that this was part of a series of commsioned illustrations for a book called Radical Technology (and endlesly reproduced since) so I suspexcct this was just lfited for the poster.
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