No one believes encampments are a good thing—but the debate is still raging over whether they’ve become a necessary one
| The battle over Canadian tent cities | | In Vancouver, a small portside green space called CRAB Park has a unique claim to fame: it is home to the city’s only legal tent encampment community. It has semi-permanent infrastructure, including a kitchen tent. The city is allowed to clean the area up but not evict the residents, who each occupy 10-by-10-foot plots. For Maclean’s, Sarah Berman and Jesse Winter co-authored a fascinating feature called “The Encampment Wars,” about how the tent city became protected. They describe the way one young lawyer, just four months out of law school, brought a challenge to the province’s Supreme Court on behalf of the residents and changed the face of Vancouver. Increasingly, courts are ruling along similar lines, prohibiting municipalities from clearing encampments. The CRAB Park story is playing out across the country, wherever unhoused people are pitching tents, between highrises, under bridges, along riverbanks and in parks. –Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief | | | | |
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| | | A Joni Mitchell Deep Dive | | | | Since the ecstatic reception to her surprise set at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022—her first live performance in 20 years—and her viral Grammys debut in February, folk icon Joni Mitchell is back and more beloved than ever before. The next addition to the Mitchell renaissance is NPR music critic Ann Powers’s Traveling, a biography about the singer’s path from rural Alberta to then-hippie-haven Yorkville in Toronto and, finally, to her late-’60s home in Laurel Canyon (which famously inspired Graham Nash’s “Our House”). As a long-time admirer of the elusive singer, Powers explores the nature of fandom and the limitations of biography to know ultimately unknowable icons like Mitchell. | | |
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