In the financial district of Toronto, Canada's biggest city, you find the headquarters of banks, stock brokerages, financial institutions and law firms. During the winter months, at night the district is also home to many homeless people, who are attracted by the waste heat from the massive heating installations. The hot air that is blown out through gratings on the pavement makes the nights, when temperatures can drop to twenty degrees below freezing, a bit more bearable. Palu shows how people use urban space to work and survive, sometimes despite the intentions of the planners and architects.

In Afghanistan's Helmand province, American marines are involved in daily battles with rebels. This extremely violent region is known as the ‘snake head’, after the pattern that a chain of villages appear to make from the air. The average age of the marines fighting there is 21. Many of them have already done several tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. Louie Palu did portraits of them after their return from patrols.