Hello everyone! We’re Dawn in Regent Park, a team of two University of Toronto students and three Regent Park residents: Andrew, a fourth-year urban studies and political science student; Asae, a community activist and mom to three; Julie, a community activist and mom to one; Meghan, a fourth-year urban studies and human geography student; and Semhar, a medical lab technician, community activist, and mom to two. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you along on our journey as we put together a project on the changes in crime in Regent Park.
As the first half of the semester comes to a close, the focus of our course has moved from lectures on the various histories within Regent Park—community organizing, immigration, and disease, to name a few—to developing and executing our media project. This meant it was also time for us to fully define our group. While we had been put into our groups a bit earlier in the semester, this was the first time we got to really sit down and talk about what we wanted to be and what we wanted to do.
At our first group meeting during the previous class, we had mostly isolated a general topic we wanted to discuss. In a previous session, everyone was asked to send Prof. Mehta a potential research question relating to course themes and Regent Park, and these questions would be used to assemble groups with similar interests. We then referred back to these questions when deciding on our topic, and ultimately chose to go with Julie’s, which focused on crime in Regent Park and how it has changed over the course of revitalization. However, “crime in Regent Park” offers a lot of potential avenues to research. Were we going to focus on petty crime, such as theft, or larger and more violent ones, such as shootings? What time frame were we interested in? As such, narrowing down our focus was an essential part of our meeting this week.
Picking a temporal window was fairly easy: as we wanted to focus on how changes in crime related to revitalization, we decided to centre our research around that time, as well as including information from 5-10 years beforehand. Julie and Asae suggested that this would make our start date around 2000-2001. Choosing a facet of our initial research topic was a little bit harder, but Asae, Julie, and Semhar all agreed that from their experience, gang violence and shootings would be not only among the most common types, but also the most relevant and important.
With this in mind, we formulated our main research question: how has gang-related activity changed in Regent Park since revitalization? We will also be exploring the following three sub-questions to help focus our research further:
How has the crime rate changed?
How has the nature of crime changed?
How has people’s sense of security in Regent Park changed? Do they feel safer now than they did then?
With all of this in mind, it was also essential for us to choose a name. While coming up with a topic and narrowing it down was fairly easy, we all stumbled a bit deciding what to call ourselves until Semhar suggested Dawn in Regent Park. When we asked why, she said that it was because we could see a brighter future on the horizon for residents of the neighbourhood. This very much fit with our topic and theme, so this was the name we decided to go with.
Overall, there was a lot of excitement in our group surrounding our project. As soon as we had chosen a name and a research question, we began discussing where we could find information about our topic. Asae, Julie, and Semhar suggested several community contacts we could interview for our project, as well as a few community media outlets that may have done some reporting on crime, revitalization or both. With all of this brainstorming done, we’re looking forward to hitting the ground running on our project.