In recent years there have been many exhibitions and biennales focusing on the way we live now and our expectations of our built environments. Possibly the most spectacular of these exhibitions was the huge touring show, Civilisation: The way we live now, a version of which was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria last year. The sub-theme of that show was that the world was in a mess, the future was a nightmare and that this was the most optimistic prognosis.

Habitat at CMAG is a relatively small exhibition with a huge appetite that examines aspects of the human environment from the dilapidated backblocks of Canberra to the sheer desperate poverty of the slums of Lahore, the destruction of homes in Beirut, high-rise apartments in Singapore, squatting in Germany, traces of Indigenous habitation in Australia and loads more.

It is not that it is a bad show and the cast of included artists is quite impressive - Alex Asch, Burchill/McCamley, Miriam Charlie, Sean Davey, David Flanagan, Michal Glikson, Tina Havelock Stevens, Katie Hayne, Mikhaila Jurkiewicz, Waratah Lahy, Hardy Lohse, Catherine O'Donnell, David Paterson, Alan Patterson, Patrice Riboust, Natalie Rosin, Khaled Sabsabi and James Tylor (Possum). The real problem is that the show lacks a focus.

An encyclopaedic approach to such a popular topic, when you are on a very limited budget and have few resources, leads to a disappointing outcome. Something along the lines of Habitat: Ways of living in Canberra would have been more manageable and would have resulted in a more conceptually coherent exhibition.

Habitat can be best thought of as a series of separate visual essays - some photographic, others painted, drawn, constructed or recorded on film - collectively presenting personal impressions of largely urban environments around the world. Some of the more memorable images at the exhibition include Hardy Lohse's understated photographic essay, Diane's home, Northbourne Flats, in Canberra (2017). Lohse, a Canberra-based documentary photographer, records quiet dilapidation in living conditions and of a human life. It is a difficult balancing act between objectified documentation and a voyeuristic intrusion and while I do not doubt that all of the necessary permissions were obtained, as a viewer, I was a little perplexed by my attitude to what I was observing.

The omnipresent Alex Asch presents a strange installation of little black boxes that hint at housing units and something of a modular codification for existence. On one hand, there is the association with the "little boxes made of ticky-tacky" and looking all the same (written by Malvina Reynolds and immortalised by her friend Pete Seeger in the 1960s). On the other, there is the recurring theme that some urban environments frame the people who live there, while others are created in their image and reflect their values and aspirations.

James Tylor is an artist proud of his Kaurna/Maori ancestry, who in his beautifully worked hand-coloured inkjet prints of scar trees and other objects reasserts the Aboriginal presence in the landscape. This seems to be more of a statement about "ways of living" than signs of an imposed man-made habitat.

Also memorable are the perfectly distilled images by Mikhaila Jurkiewicz of the "Canberra bohemia" in their frozen poses and Waratah Lahy's beautifully executed paintings of the uneasy transition in urban renewal.

Habitat is an exhibition that opens a dialogue about expectations that we place on the world's natural resources to maintain a particular lifestyle and what exactly is necessary for survival and what is excess.