I was just reading a bit about mesolithic hunter gatherers and the transition in NW Europe to the neolithic.
I have also been watching with fascination modern humans attempt the hunter gatherer lifestyle in the Alone series.
One of the biggest revelations to me is how quickly people can create a shelter and then adapt themselves to living in that shelter for a long period of time. None of the contestants drop out because they don't like the paint job, or cabinetry. As long as there is a roof over their head to keep the rain, the wind and the snow at bay, and a smokeless fire to keep them warm then they have met their minimum shelter requirements.
What drives most contestants to quit is the lack of food available and the lack of company.
Historically the lack of food is countered by mobility. Kayaks and coracles and sleds pulled buy dogs and deer permitted foraging over large areas.
What happens if -
People start prioritizing a car over a permanent roof?
Start living in provincial parks and crownland in their cars or vans, in tents and commute into the settled spaces to hunt for work and gather paychecks? Is the next step to claim their campsite? To start improving it? Digging holes. Building dirt and stone walls and chimneys? Timber walls? Wattle roofs? Rail fences?
There is lots of evidence of people setting up tent encampments in cities, reflective of the old hobo jungles of the thirties.
There is lots of evidence of people who lose their home holding on to their vehicles as a last refuge and for its mobility.
Saskatoon's early settlers found themselves surviving their first winters by digging caves into the dirt of the riverbank.
Flat landers with no trees dug up sods of grass and stacked them over the pits they dug and built soddies.
Municipal planning rules all prevent such temporary accommodation measures but we are already seeing that authority has its limits and that zones of anarchy are spreading. Although I am not sure that anarchy is the right word because I am willing to bet that each of those tent villages has a structure with fixers and organizers and spokes people and enforcers. So perhaps it is more appropriate to speak of "no go areas"? Modern history offers Yorkville in Toronto, Gastown in Vancouver, Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, the People's Republic of Fremont in Seattle and more recently the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, Christiania in Copenhagen....multiple temporary communities along the US-Mexico border.
If authority stands in the way of Maslow authority loses.
People immigrating to Canada may all aspire to what they see on the TV back in their homelands but many of them are used to living a lot rougher than us locals. Another year or two of living rough to build a different future may deter some but historical evidence suggests to me that it will be just another hurdle for many.
In my lifetime, which isn't that long, I have seen locals complain about neighbourhoods being taken over by immigrants swarming into houses that used to house one family. I saw it with Italian streets in England. West Indian and Pakistani streets over there as well. Sikh streets in the Lower Mainland. My grandparents talked about the Highlanders and the Irish coming into Glasgow. Archaeology has shown that Karl Marx's industrial slums of the 1830s and '40s, when they were built 70 years previously as planned communities by the factory owners, were well appointed single family homes suitable for a middle class lifestyle that attracted all sorts of cold, damp and starving labourers from the farms. They told their brothers and sisters and soon you had multiple nuclear families living under one roof. Ultimately demand outstripped supply and more people crowded under the available roofs and divided up the large space in smaller private spaces. The factor owners benefited from the increased supply of labour and the price of labour decreased. .....
We have been here before....
The silly people are those that never understood the lesson of Canute and try to control the tides of nature by exerting authority.
