Designed as a utopian “Garden City” project for the Anglo-Celtic working class of Toronto in the 1950s, Regent Park has become the epitome of urban decline and redemption in mainstream narratives of Toronto’s history (Jamil 2015, p. 232). Although it is difficult to pinpoint precisely where the “decline” began, it is clear that the stigmatization of the neighbourhood can be traced to the increase in immigrants from non-Anglo or European background with the neighbourhood being pathologized as “black and crime-ridden” (Jamil 2015, p. 324). Although the demographic makeup of the community has not changed much since the influx of “visible minority” migrants in the 1970s and 1980s, discourses surrounding the area have entirely reversed with the optimism brought on by the revitalization project taking place at the moment. With this drastic turn in public perception, there is perhaps no better group to turn to than the Muslim community, specifically the young Muslim women of Regent Park, to begin understanding how this changing neighbourhood affects daily lives.
As a highly stigmatized physical expression of faith, the hijab conveys the religious identity of Muslim women, offering contrasting experiences of belonging depending on the socio-spatial context that they find themselves in. In Regent Park, young Muslim women feel safe and culturally inclusive in a community that shares their faith; being Muslim is a common way of life that unites Regent Park residents. However, our conversations with female Muslim teen residents revealed that outside of Regent Park, being Muslim is seen as a massive part of their identities. The hijab visually denotes Muslim women by their religious affiliation. While a common sight in Regent Park, the veil invites micro-aggressions and harassment from strangers when residents leave the neighbourhood. Muslim women are not seen as individuals with their unique relationships to their faith but are viewed as a representation of the “other” that is unwelcome and dangerous (Nagra, 2018).
These negative assumptions from the outside inwards threaten the right for Muslim women to practice their faith. Maryam, a Muslim classmate of our Diva Girls, mentions how she often does not wear her hijab outside of Regent Park, despite doing so in her neighbourhood, because of the backlash she might face in other areas of the city. Maryam specifically uses the words: “I barely practice my religion outside of Regent [Park],” implying that wearing the hijab is not a passive banality but is an intentional garb that is meant to signify something every minute that it is worn. As such, the veil offers new ways of looking at how Muslim women negotiate their notions of piety while challenging accepted assumptions of what it means to a “progressive, modern, and cosmopolitan Muslim woman” (Aljunied 2017, p. 104).
Diva Girls, Sumeya and Fazra, state that while they know what reactions to expect from other people when inside Regent Park, they do not know how they will be treated when outside of the community as young Muslim women. “Going out of the community, there are so many people that just stare at you as if you’re some type of sculpture,” says Fazra. Living in an ethnoburb, like Regent Park, represents a positive way for these young Muslim women to reaffirm their presence in Toronto and their “right to the city.” (Qadeer, 2014). Regent Park provides community public space for these young women to freely practice and express their religious identities without hesitation or fear.
At the onset of our project, we planned to produce a website that would feature artistic crowd-sourced content from Regent Park youth that depicts their experiences and feelings of in-betweenness. We created an online submission portal through which Regent Park youth could share their multi-media representations of their religious in-betweenness, such as drawings, photographs, poems, short stories, videos, and audio recordings. However, with the unprecedented spread of the COVID-19, we did not have the response we anticipated from the neighbourhood residents nor the Diva Girls, for everyone’s responsibilities and concerns shifted with the drastic changes in our way of life. While the extenuating circumstances of COVID-19 have obstructed our learning and ability to meet in-person, we believe that these circumstances have positively impacted our project, put aptly by group member Alejandra in the mantra: “Creativity out of scarcity.” Therefore, we relied on the material that we already had from the interviews we conducted alongside the Diva Girls and what was available online. We decided that synthesizing our findings into a video format that told stories of in-betweenness both verbally and visually.
Regardless of the changing nature of the outcome of the final product, we wanted to emphasize Asthana’s (2017) theory of “translation and localization,” whereby young people refashion broader cultural understandings to reflect their localized social realities. The universal is not rejected but is instead contextualized to reflect the local cultural identity (Asthana, 2017). Highlighting the Diva Girls’ spoken testimony allowed us to elevate their voices as a means of contextualizing faith in Regent Park and Toronto as a whole. Their accounts, in conjunction with the external voice clips, provide is a juxtaposition of the narrative most commonly produced by the media where the Muslim faith, and the hijab, in particular, are centered as the cause of Islamophobic discrimination and harassment.
Our project intends to address the following question: “How do young Muslim women experience in-betweenness in Regent Park and Toronto more broadly?” Our team name, POI: Points of Intersection, refers to the intersectionality that manifests itself in the combination of two cultures (Islamic and Canadian). Through our conversations with the Diva Girls, they explained that they experience points of intersection as they traverse between their neighbourhood community of religious solidarity and the outside world that carries its prejudice and discrimination. We aimed to provide nuances to the injustices that they may experience daily, conveying the complex and varied lived experiences of female Muslim teenagers. Our project intends to open up a larger conversation about Muslim identity in Canada and how it is not monolithic. Western culture tends to portray the Muslim female experience with a Hijab as one of oppression, fueled by cultural explanations of patriarchy that posit gender inequalities in Muslim communities as a result of Islam (Nagra, 2018). Misconceptions of Muslim women as passive victims of their culture works to marginalize and increasingly “other” them in mainstream Canadian society, perpetuating Islamophobia.
Sumeya and Atiya mention how Islam makes them better people through committing to frequent prayer and performing good deeds, disrupting externally imposed images of their identities. These experiences can be corroborated further by Aljunied (2017) not only as an expression of faith but also as a way of showing their “ability to deal with prejudice, stigma, bias, and intolerance, in a composed and respectable way that demonstrates openness and confidence” (p. 112). Through sharing such experiences of our Diva Girls, our video highlights the strength and altruism that Islam garners. We wanted to create content to which other young Muslim women can relate to continue the ongoing process of finding justice in the city for themselves and their community. We also wanted to inform and educate those who are not Muslim of the complexities and nuances of being a young Muslim woman in Toronto.
The lessons we take away from this experience are threefold and have proven to be impactful examples of how media can create and change discourses surrounding entire cities, neighbourhoods, and people. In the broadest sense, Regent Park’s position to Toronto provided a solid basis for understanding the context in which we were working. Despite all three of us having lived in Toronto for many years, none of us had ever spent any extended time in Regent Park. This course provided us with the unique opportunity to better understand and investigate how the discourses surrounding neighbourhood came to be and how the Diva Girls, in particular, feel that it impacts their lives outside of the community. Although we can learn about the grand policy and housing plans for Regent Park via lecture or readings, this secondary knowledge pales in comparison to the lived experiences of the “revitalization.”
At the neighbourhood level, it became evident the vital role that Regent Park Focus plays in the community and for the Diva Girls. As we aim to show in our final media product, the impact that community and support from something as informal as friends at a mosque or the more structured Regent Park Focus, provides an invaluable resource for forming the strong identity that the Diva Girls have. Despite the experiences of discrimination, they recounted to us either because of their hijab or various other micro-aggressions, Regent Park kept resurfacing as a point of pride, comfort, and security. However, the Regent that they consistently referred to is “Old Regent,” where the original buildings and spatial configuration existed across the entire neighbourhood, a pocket of which still exists in the Northside of the neighbourhood delineated by Gerrard Street East. Their attachment to a specific type of Regent Park is corroborated by Rahder and MacLean’s (2013) idea that “identity and behaviours will always have spatial implications” (p. 158), demonstrating the vital role that neighbourhood organizations, such as Regent Park Focus, play in community and identity development.
As has been an essential aspect of our coursework throughout our academic careers, understanding lived experiences and respecting local knowledge became a large part of our learning experience. Going on the walking tour with the Diva Girls allowed us to be active listeners as a group, engaging with the personal significance imbued in the sites that they showed us. The excitement with which the Diva Girls talked about showing us where there had been a shooting a few summers ago was a moment where the benefits of having a connection with the Diva Girls and an understanding of their lived experience became most important. The experiences of the course and the creation of the media project, in conjunction with the Diva Girls, deepened our understanding of how to enter and engage with spaces with different material and social realities than our own, a skill valuable not only for future projects in urban planning or design but also throughout our lives.
Watch our final project below:
The POI: Points of Intersection team members are Alejandra, Atiya, Brittany, Nathan, and Sumeya.
References
Aljunied, K. (2017). Hijabis as Purveyors of Muslim Cosmopolitanism. In Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Southeast Asian Islam in Comparative Perspective (pp. 102-130). Edinburgh University Press.
Asthana, S. (2017, January 10). Translation and localization of children’s rights in youth-produced digital media in the Global South: A hermeneutic exploration. New Media & Society, 19(5), 686-700. doi:/10.1177/1461444816686320
Jamil, U. (2015, September 7). Making place: Muslims in the neighbourhood. Contemporary Islam, 9(3), 321-335. doi:10.1007/s11562-015-0346-y
Nagra, B. (2018, May 7) Cultural Explanations of Patriarchy, Race, and Everyday Lives: Marginalizing and “Othering” Muslim Women in Canada, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 38(2), 263-279, doi:10.1080/13602004.2018.1466488
Qadeer, M. A. (2014). Viewpoint: The Multicultural City. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 23(1), 116-126. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/26195271
Rahder, B. & MacLean, H. (2013). Other Ways of Knowing Your Place: Immigrant Women’s Experience of Public Space in Toronto. Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 22(1), 145-166. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26193930