A consistent thread in discussions of Toronto’s Regent Park neighbourhood is the idea that it is a major epicenter of crime. Throughout this course, we have engaged with and attempted to challenge article after article, academic or otherwise, that describes Regent Park as a place where bad things happen. These articles are emblematic of a process known as territorial stigmatization, which assigns areas identities based around poverty, disorder, and violence regardless of whether such events are representative of the place as a whole (Jahiu & Cinnamon, 2022, p. 4548). With such a strong stigma surrounding the neighbourhood, it is no surprise that the redevelopment of Regent Park was framed as an attempt to deconcentrate poverty and make the space safer (Thompson et al., 2013, p. 928; Urbanik et al., 2017, p. 422). However, the displacement associated with revitalization, as well as the gentrification that may come with it, have typically been associated with unintended increases in crime and violence as they destabilize individuals’ existing social structures; for example, the displacement of high-ranking individuals creates power vacuums that disrupt existing criminal hierarchies (Urbanik et al., 2017, p. 424). As such, it was possible that Regent Park post-revitalization might be a more dangerous place than before. With this in mind, we aimed to answer a seemingly simple question: “How have crime and perceptions of it changed in Regent Park since revitalization?”
We employed a wide variety of methods to answer our research question. Much of our research design and direction, especially in the early stages of the project, came in the form of conversations with Julie, Asae, and Semhar, the three residents we worked with: each one had their own personal experiences with both crime in Regent Park and perceptions of the neighbourhood’s safety and were willing to share those experiences with us. They also had several contacts within the community, such as Community Safety Network volunteer Lloyd Pike, who could provide expert opinions to help strengthen our project and answer our question. Because our group had such a wealth of information, we conducted a series of filmed interviews with both our resident contacts and our expert contacts to include within our project. In this way, we were able to engage with some of the key concepts of participatory action research: we got the chance to talk to our research partners on their terms as described by Torre et al. (2012, p. 176) and to encourage them to reflect on their own lived experiences (Torre et al., 2012, p. 178). This also encouraged us to challenge our own perceptions: before the interviews, our perception of Regent Park was formed through the news and through word of mouth and so was quite biased, while our residents told a much different story about a far safer neighbourhood.
While we could have stopped at a series of interviews, it was also critical that our research project have some sort of interactive component to allow others to engage with the questions we were asking and the data we collected. With this in mind, we chose to utilize a Story Map—a rather unique ArcGIS application that allows users to combine a series of maps with textual explanations and other supplemental media—to not only provide a spatial axis to our data, but also to allow people to engage with our project the same way they might, for instance, explore local restaurants on Google Maps. The use of a heat map, time lapse and a slider for our maps allows the user to explore and engage with the project in a way that could not be represented with a video or a wall of text. We could even include our interviews within the Story Map, giving users a fully multimedia experience. In this way, our project combines the varying expertise of each of our group members: we could build upon the knowledge of one student with an understanding of GIS, another with an understanding of film and video editing, and our three resident team members to produce knowledge in a way that catered to each of our strengths.
Our main goal during this project was to challenge existing narratives about safety in Regent Park. As previously mentioned, the neighbourhood faces an extensive amount of territorial stigmatization from both media and individual outsiders due to its history as a social housing community. Public housing complexes are viewed in most discourses as “isolated, pathological, dysfunctional, and unhealthy” (August, 2014, p. 1319) and are assumed to be a place where danger lurks behind every corner. However, our experiences with our resident team members told us a very different story: all three spoke to how safe they felt, especially since revitalization had started, and how different the community was from outsiders’ assumptions. From our group, only Julie lived in the neighbourhood before the redevelopment started, however all members shared stories about how they were warned by family and friends about the crime in Regent Park, something we went into detail with in our interviews. We wanted our project to share these stories with people whose assumptions of Regent Park might be negative, and to create knowledge surrounding community safety that both community members and outsiders could benefit from.
Because this was our first experience with fully hands-on research, we learned a lot about the process. In terms of practical skills, we learned proper interview techniques, including how to structure our questions and how to leave room for our participants to share things that they felt relevant to our project; we also learned how to direct a research group in such a way that would allow for organic knowledge creation while still keeping everyone on-track and focused. Additionally, this was an opportunity for our student with ArcGIS experience to apply her knowledge for the first time, and for our film editor to apply his knowledge to a new format. Perhaps most importantly, both for those of us going on to engage in further research and those who were simply here to experience something new, it gave us the opportunity to truly experience how rewarding and frustrating research can be. We faced limited existing data, for example: official statistics on crime at the neighbourhood level only dated back to 2014, and any information prior to 2005 had to be provided by Julie, the only member of our group who had lived in Regent Park since before that time. The process of creating knowledge is quite enjoyable—there is a great sense of accomplishment that comes learning something that no one has really explored before—but it is also time-consuming and non-linear, and at times can be somewhat disheartening when things do not quite go according to plan. We have learned to be flexible but focused, to seek out information in unexpected places, and to trust the process; the knowledge will come, even if it was not what we initially expected to find.
Regent Park has faced years of stigma from media and outsiders, and has been described regularly as a space of great violence and risk. However, when we embarked on our research journey with our resident group, we got the chance to experience the positives of Regent Park through their eyes. Using tools drawn from participatory action research, we devised a project that could share some of these narratives and the sense of safety that our participants conveyed to us. This experience gave us a variety of skills to perform our own research in the field: the ability to keep a group organized, the practical skills to produce a GIS project that is navigable and communicative, and an understanding of the challenges of research were just a few of them. This experience has been deeply rewarding and we look forward to sharing our research project.
Here is the link to our final project: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/13e3fa00b886411b8cb500bfcf6d21c6
Dawn in Regent Park: Andrew, Asae, Julie, Meghan, and Semhar.
References:
August, M. (2014). Challenging the rhetoric of stigmatization: The benefits of concentrated poverty in Toronto’s Regent Park. Environment and Planning A, 46(6), 1317-1333. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45635
Jahiu, L., & Cinnamon, J. (2022). Media coverage and territorial stigmatization: An analysis of crime news articles and crime statistics in Toronto. GeoJournal, 87(6), 4547-4564. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-021-10511-5
Thompson, S. K., Bucerius, S. M., & Luguya, M. (2013). Unintended consequences of neighbourhood restructuring: Uncertainty, disrupted social networks, and increased fear of violent victimization among young adults. The British Journal of Criminology, 53(9), 924-941. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23639797
Torre, M. E., Fine, M., Stoudt, B. G., & Fox, M. (2012). Critical participatory action research as public science. In H. Cooper, P. M. Camic,
D. L. Long, A. T. Panter, D. Rindskopf, & K. J. Sher (Eds.), APA handbook of research methods in psychology, (Vol. 2, pp. 171-184). American Psychological Association.
Urbanik, M., Thompson, S. K., & Bucerius, S. M. (2017). ‘Before there was danger but there was rules. And safety in those rules’: Effects of neighbourhood redevelopment on criminal structures. The British Journal of Criminology, 57(2), 422-440. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azv128