We made some great progress this week. All the people we plan on interviewing have been locked in, and one of the interviews has already been done, and it went great! The remainder of the interviews will occur over the next week. At the same time, we have been making progress in defining our narrative and approach to telling our story.
Interview Progress
Before this week’s meeting, we all met a couple of times outside of class to discuss various aspects of the work we need to do. We finalized our interview plans, deciding when they would occur, who would conduct each interview, and developing interview questions. We have been in the process of making an interview protocol which will guide us throughout each interview, though we discussed how to keep the interviews comfortable and respectful to provide the best results. This would involve allowing the conversation to carry the interview in the best direction and providing the interviewee with most of the control. These interview goals align with and reference the discussions about reflexivity in class. Our objective is to be as reflexive with these interviews as possible, and we will approach them very openly.
Article and Research Goals and Thoughts
As for the article, during the ongoing planning for the interviews, we have discussed research and how to approach the article. Our research will mainly focus on how urban agriculture and gardens in Regent Park contribute to making the neighbourhood more accessible. In addition to community and resident gardens, we want to learn more about greenhouses, such as how they work, what kind of resource demands they may or may not have, and how to create a greenhouse with the least amount of resources possible. We also want to research the effectiveness of urban agriculture so we can have evidence that would allow us to advocate for gardens in Regent Park. Especially since there is a lack of space for residents to grow their own food, and there are seemingly no plans to increase the capacity for urban agriculture in future developments. We have also identified 3 types of gardens, which we will illustrate with photographs and a map (we have not finalized the names, and this thought is still new):
Garden Type 1 (Revit/New Building Gardens): Gardens that were built with the new developments, such as the one on top of Daniels Spectrum, which lack easy access
Garden Type 2 (Revit/New Ground Gardens): Gardens that were built with revitalization, such as the Regent Park Community Garden. These are more accessible but are quite small and few in number
Garden Type 3 (Resident Gardens): These gardens are the self-built gardens that residents started on their lawns or at the sides of the old buildings. We feel that these are the most accessible type of garden because they can be set up anywhere, fairly easily, and are closest to residents.
Identifying these garden types will help influence our thinking and research.
Community Garden Map
Here is a storyboard for the audio
Our intended target audience will be everyone. We want the media and literature that we produce to be accessible to residents in and outside of Regent Park, of various age groups, and also accessible to City staff and scholars. By keeping the text and language accessible (meaning, not using overly-polished academic prose), we can reach a wider audience. The podcast could be very opportune for people who are gardening because they could potentially listen to it while they’re out working! With the seed book, we are hoping that it can help people who are already familiar with gardening but also provide information and knowledge for beginners or people looking to get into gardening.
Next Steps
As we do the interviews, the main task will be researching and beginning writing our article. We already have a rough structure and idea of how things will look and what we need to do, but the most important task right now is to get pencils to paper. We have allocated specific tasks to our research. Some of us will focus more on the interviews, while others will focus on writing and research. The interviews will also help with the production of the podcast, as we need recordings of each interview to include for creating a narrative. The seed book will also start to be produced as we go forward.
The Growing Regent Park team members are Lukas, Nicholas, Saima, Zahra, and Zhiyi