Project
Canaan: Haiti's Promised Land
How the residents of Canaan navigate land rights, urban planning, and governance—on their own.
Writer Jacob Kushner and documentary photographer Allison Shelley traveled to Haiti for their project "Canaan: Haiti's Promised Land."
In the six years since Haiti's major earthquake, the world has been focused on building a quake-resistant, investor-friendly Port-au-Prince. But ten miles north of downtown, over 200,000 of the displaced are creating their own solution, with virtually no government or NGO support. Residents are transforming this scrub-covered range of hills with no water, electricity, roads or other city services—biblically named Canaan—into what will soon be Haiti's third-largest urban center, erecting their own electrical poles, making cinder blocks and trucking in water.
What can a group of impoverished, displaced people—who for six years have been regarded as helpless victims—teach the global aid industry about urbanism in the 21st Century? Is Canaan a promised land or another disaster in the making?
