Religious Institutions in Regent Park

Prior to participating in the collaborative media production process with Regent Park’s Diva Girls these past few months, I had never considered the role that faith and religious institutions play in shaping our cities. Indeed, the role of faith-based organizations in urban settings often goes unnoticed, particularly as western governments and planning organizations consider themselves to be secular and predicate their work on a notion of religious indifference (Manouchehrifar, 2018). Through my experiences collaborating with the Diva Girls and producing a media project, I was able to gain a much deeper understanding of the variety of roles that religious institutions play in a neighbourhood and how central they are to both social service provision and community building. This is particularly true for neighbourhoods like Regent Park, in which religious institutions have partially filled the gap left by the state’s inadequate support for the neighbourhood’s diverse residents.

My media project seeks to address this underrepresentation of religious institutions in the consideration of various urban issues, from community-building to social service provision. This is particularly important in a neighbourhood like Regent Park, which has changed dramatically through its revitalization. While many community organizations and non-profits were able to secure space in the revitalized neighbourhoods, faith-based organizations were often not afforded the same privilege. Notably, two of Regent Park’s mosques, which have operated in the basement of Regent Park apartment buildings at no cost, were not able to secure equivalent space in the redevelopment and have likely already closed down as their buildings are prepared for demolition (Vaughn, 2009; Jamil, 2015). This example alone shows that the role played by religious institutions in supporting and creating community in Regent Park has gone unnoticed by municipal officials and planners, at a detriment to Regent Park’s community.

Many of Regent Park’s mosques operated in the basements of the neighbourhood’s original apartment buildings at no cost. They already have or will likely need to shut down once these final remnants of the first Regent Park are demolished. (Photo by Fazra)

The role of religious institutions is doubly important in Regent Park because of the strong role they play in helping settle new immigrants. From the 1970s onward, Regent Park has been a reception area for new immigrants arriving to Toronto (Purdy, 2003). This has continued in recent decades, with 16.2% of Regent Park’s residents classified as recent immigrants in 2001 (City of Toronto, 2003). Religious institutions, including churches, mosques, and temples, often play the single strongest role in helping new immigrants settle into their new neighbourhood (Ley, 2008). These religious institutions, on the practical side, provide recent immigrants with a variety of services and programs that help them adapt to life in Canada. This includes helping individuals find employment, helping parents navigate a new education system on their child’s behalf, offering language classes for both children and adults, and providing material needs like clothing and food to low-income families. Even more importantly, however, religious institutions provide new immigrants with an immediate source of community, connecting them to people who share their beliefs and, in many cases, their ethnicity and language. Religious institutions are able to provide new immigrants with social capital and help them forge connections in an unfamiliar and daunting new environment, creating strong communities of mutual understanding and support (Ley, 2008).

It is also important to acknowledge that religious institutions provide these social and cultural supports, in addition to a wide variety of other social services, in response to the retrenchment of the welfare state (Beaumont, 2008). All levels of government in Canada have downsized the provision of social services over the past three decades in particular, adopting an increasingly neoliberal and privatized approach to welfare provision. In response, faith-based organizations have stepped in to fill the gaps left by the state, providing not only their congregation but also the wider community with an array of services, including food banks, hot meals, clothing, educational classes, and children’s programs (Beaumont, 2008). These services are particularly important in neighbourhoods like Regent Park, which, as a social housing development, has a high concentration of individuals and families living below the poverty line and which has historically been underserved by the state (Jamil, 2015).

Considering these integral functions played by religious institutions, particularly in marginalized neighbourhoods, the goal of my media project is to illuminate the history of religious institutions in Regent Park and to get viewers to think about the critical role that religious institutions play in forming and supporting community in urban neighbourhoods. My media project is a story map, which shows the various religious institutions that have been established in Regent Park both prior to and throughout the neighbourhood’s development. The story map shows how religious institutions have developed in the neighbourhood largely in response to changes in immigration patterns, reinforcing the central role they play in community-building and settlement for newcomers. It also highlights the wide variety of social services offered by Regent Park’s churches, mosques, and temples, including food banks, counselling services, and mentorship programs for youth. By showing how the religious fabric of Regent Park has changed over time, I hope to help highlight the integral role these institutions have played in the community for decades.

A construction site in Regent Park, where an original residential complex one stood. (Photo by Daria)

Initially, I did not anticipate making a story map for this media project. My group, Positive Space, which included Fazra and Amina, two Regent Park Diva Girls, wanted to interview Muslim residents of Regent Park about their feelings of belonging and identity in the community. We then hoped to produce a series of short videos that paired the audio from our interview with photographs of the participants around the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, our project became impossible due to the University closure and social distancing required during COVID-19. At this point, I switched gears and felt that a story map was an interesting and interactive way to showcase the history and importance of Regent Park’s religious fabric. The story map platform offers a number of features that I felt could make this project impactful. It has a strong spatial element, allowing me to show where in the neighbourhood religious institutions established themselves across time using a series of maps. It also allows me to incorporate visuals throughout the project, using pictures of the religious institutions to show how their physical spaces and facilities have transformed over time. This is particularly helpful in showing how recently established places of worship, particularly Regent Park’s mosques, have established themselves in basements and commercial spaces in contrast to older churches that were able to build their own designated structures. Finally, the story map is a highly interactive platform, allowing the viewer to actively participate in the project by clicking on map icons and pictures. Given the limitations in place during the current pandemic, I thought this was an engaging way to illuminate Regent Park’s religious fabric digitally.

The process of compiling this story map showed me how little information is available about religious institutions in our city. Collecting the information for this project was extremely challenging, as only the religious institutions themselves tended to document any of their history, if at all. This led me to obscure websites, Facebook pages, Google reviews, and even the use of Google Earth Street View and Google Earth Pro to use historical satellite images to see when places of worship were built or demolished in the neighbourhood. In other circumstances, it would have been invaluable to interview both leaders of these religious institutions and members of their congregation to learn more about their history and the role they play in Regent Park. Overall, producing this project showed me how much opportunity there is to research and document the role of religious institutions in Toronto.

A photo highlighting the contrast between Regent Park’s new and old apartment buildings. (Photo by Fazra)

More importantly, producing this project, and working with the Diva Girls earlier this year, showed me how central religious institutions are to their neighbourhoods and communities. From supporting tenant activism in the 1960s (Purdy, 2004) to running food banks for low-income individuals and families, religious institutions have been at the heart of Regent Park since the first iteration of the social housing project was built in the 1940s. Both at present and historically, the vast majority of Regent Park’s religious institutions were formed by the neighbourhood’s predominant immigrant groups, from its Macedonian-Bulgarian Orthodox churches built in the 1940s to its mosques built in the 1990s and early 2000s. While the physical spaces these institutions occupy has varied greatly depending on when they were built, they all served a vital function in helping develop community for the neighbourhood’s newcomers and supplementing lackluster social services for the neighbourhood’s most vulnerable residents. While their roles may not be formally recognized by municipal officials or planners, Regent Park’s religious institutions will remain central in maintaining and, in some cases, rebuilding Regent Park’s diverse and vibrant communities as they have been displaced and disconnected through the revitalization.

See the full story map here.

The Positive Space team members are Amina, Fazra, and Daria.

 Works Cited 

Beaumont, J. (2008). Faith Action on Urban Social Issues. Urban Studies, 45(10), 2019-2034. doi: 10.1177/0042098008094871

City of Toronto. (2003). Regent Park: Social Profile #2 - Neighbourhoods Immigration, Ethnicity, Language. City of Toronto Community & Neighbourhood Services. Retrieved from https://www.toronto.ca/ext/sdfa/Neighbourhood%20Profiles/pdf/2001/pdf2/cpa72.pdf

Jamil, U. (2015). Making place: Muslims in the neighbourhood. Contemporary Islam, 9, 321-335. doi: 10.1007/s11562-015-0346-y 

Ley, D. (2008). The Immigrant Church as an Urban Service Hub. Urban Studies, 45(10), 2057-2074. doi: 10.1177/0042098008094873 

Manouchehrifar, B. (2018). Is Planning ‘Secular’? Rethinking Religion, Secularism, and Planning. Theory & Practice, 19(5), 653-677. doi: 10.1080/14649357.2018.1540722

Purdy, S. (2004). By The People, For The People: Tenant Organizing in Toronto’s Regent Park   Housing Project in the 1960s and 1970s. Journal Of Urban History, 30(4), 519-548. doi: 10.1177/0096144204263804 

Purdy, S. (2003). "Ripped off" by the System: Housing Policy, Poverty, and Territorial Stigmatization in Regent Park Housing Project, 1951-1991. Labour, 52, 45-108. doi: 10.2307/25149384

Vaughn, J. (2009, March 21). Little mosque in the basement. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/little-mosque-in-the-basement/article20445735/

One Question at a Time

On Monday, our team narrowed the focus of our project and began to make a concrete plan to implement it. This came in part from refining the goals we want our project to achieve and identifying our project’s intended audience. While our project was previously focused on comparing residents’ experiences of faith within Regent Park with their experiences outside of their neighbourhood, we have now decided to focus our project specifically on the experiences of Muslim youth within Regent Park. Through our interviews and photo series, we hope to illuminate how young people experience communities of faith in their neighbourhood and how their faith impacts their daily lived experience. Younger generations often have different relationships to faith than their parents, so we believe our project will highlight how youth culture and religion interact in ways that differ from other generations. We are hoping that our audience will be community members, and that our project will both help youth in the neighbourhood learn from one another and help older generations understand youth experiences.

We also achieved three of our more practical goals for this session: creating a detailed timeline for the project, creating a list of potential interviewees, and drafting interview questions. This is the timeline we created for our project:

The timeline feels a bit tight, but we are hoping to be able to stick to it to complete our project on time.

Fazra was instrumental in generating a list of potential interviewees. She talked to her friends from the neighbourhood, school, and other community groups like Pathways and generated a list of ten people who we could interview. This group of young people has a relatively even gender split and encompasses youth from their early teens into their mid-twenties. It includes Fazra’s friends and some community organizers who facilitate youth programming. The biggest challenge we ran into this week was trying to figure out how we will be able to schedule interviews with so many people at a time that works for our entire group. Fazra felt that a lot of her friends wouldn’t be available on evening or weekends and that it would be best to get them to record the interviews themselves, but this might make it hard to ensure consistency in our project. We are still trying to work out how to schedule our interviews.

A photo of old Regent Park buildings in the foreground and new developments in the background. Our group thought this could be a good location to photograph some of our interviewees. (Photo taken by Fazra)

This week, we also drafted a list of interview questions and began to scope out locations for our photographs within the neighbourhood. So far, we’ve come up with about ten questions that can be used to guide our interviews. They cover participants’ relationship to their faith, how their faith is connected to their neighbourhood, how faith creates community, and places where residents feel both most connected and disconnected from their faith within Regent Park. We also walked around the neighbourhood and began to brainstorm places we can take photos of our participants that showcase the religious fabric of the neighbourhood.

While we made some progress this week refining our topic and creating our interview questions, there is still a lot of uncertainty as to how exactly we are going to execute our project. While making a media project like this is exciting and liberating in many ways, it can be hard not to become anxious about living up to our own expectations about the project. I want to ensure our project is well-executed, and it can be hard at this stage in the process to believe that it will turn out as well as I hope it will. I think our project has the potential to be very powerful and to create a platform for youth voices, but this potential also creates a pressure to do this in a beneficial and impactful way. Hopefully this will be a force to motivate our group to produce a high-quality project, but at this stage in the process it can also feel like a shadow that looms over the next three weeks.

The Positive Space team members are Amine, Fazra, Daria and Jaime.

1 in 10,000

On Monday, our team went from having no real direction or idea for our project to having a solid plan figured out. It felt great to achieve the two main goals we set out to accomplish: choosing a specific research question to address and determining the format of our project. At the start of our session on Monday, we knew that we wanted to do a photography-related project but didn’t know exactly what style or approach to take. We put that question aside for a bit and started to dig deeper into what research question we wanted to explore. Fazra was interested in thinking about how residents’ experiences of religion differ inside and outside of Regent Park. This has the potential to illuminate unique elements of the Regent Park community that shape residents’ experiences of faith. While we were excited about this research question, we still weren’t sure what kind of media project would be best suited to explore it. 

Aditi really helped us bring out project ideas together. She suggested we look at The New York Times’ One in 8 Million project. This series features dozens of short videos each profiling a unique New Yorker. Rather than video footage, however, each feature shows ten black-and-white photographs of the subject as the subject narrates their own lived experience. We thought this was an amazing format that could combine Fazra and Amina’s passion for photography and our group’s interest in the experiences of specific Regent Park residents. Rather than one in eight million, our video series will document the lives of some of the ten thousand residents of Regent Park.

Daria watching a New York Times One in 8 Million feature. (Photo by Fazra)

Our plan for our project is to interview and photograph 6 to 10 members of the Regent Park community, including religious leaders, community organizers, and young people. We will take five pictures of them in the community and ask them to take five pictures outside of the community, which will be used to highlight the unique aspects of the Regent Park community through juxtaposition. We will then create a series of videos combining our interviews and photographs to explore how residents’ experiences of religion differ within and outside of Regent Park.

Fazra said she will reach out to community members and can already think of a lot of people who would love to be interviewed for the project. Once we have our participants confirmed, we’re planning to develop a series of interview questions. We will then schedule our interviews and photography sessions with our participants and leave time to put the videos together. Altogether, Fazra and I feel really excited about the project, though it may change when we get input from Amina and Jaime who were not able to be there while we worked out the project details. 

It was really inspiring to see how quickly we were able to go from having little direction to having a fully-fledged project idea and implementation plan. It can be very challenging to start envisioning these types of media projects because they can take so many different forms and address so many different questions. I was a bit worried at the start of the day that we wouldn’t be able to develop a concrete plan, so it was really amazing to see how quickly our ideas came together. It only took a little bit of guidance and inspiration to get us on the right track.

The Positive Space team members are Amine, Fazra, Daria and Jaime.

Positive Space

This week, team Positive Space was born. Fazra came up with the idea of our team name after we spent the evening walking around Regent Park together and Fazra and Amina reflected on what Regent Park meant to them. “Positive space” reflects the strong community spirit present in Regent Park, particularly before the revitalization happened. Fazra spoke about how easy it was to make new friends in Regent Park and how everybody was always open and welcoming to one another, creating the positive space she knew and loved since birth. This team name also reflects our desire to explore how religion and community are intertwined in Regent Park and how that contributes to a positive sense of community.

Our biggest achievements this week happened during the tour of Regent Park led by Fazra and Amina: we started to forge connections with each other and explored areas to focus our media project on. Both Fazra and Amina taught me more about Regent Park than I have ever learned in my classes during our tour of the neighbourhood and both were incredibly open with their own experiences. We walked on the outskirts of Regent and then through the centre of the neighbourhood, comparing the new developments to the remnants of the old neighbourhood. Fazra and Amina gave meaning to all the places we passed by, sharing stories and memories from their childhood before the revitalization began. Both Amina and Fazra described an idyllic childhood where they were constantly playing with other children in the neighbourhood, whether it was climbing small jungle gyms scattered between buildings or playing manhunt around the neighbourhood and in each other’s houses. They described an incredibly strong sense of community that they feel other children in the city, and children living in Regent Park now, were and are not able to experience. Fazra and Amina’s recollections of growing up in Regent Park not only refute dominant narratives about the old neighbourhood as crime-ridden and despondent, they also show that Regent Park had a stronger and better sense of community than many other places in the city.

Fazra’s sister’s high school lock. (Photo by Fazra)

One moment that stuck out to me during our tour was Fazra sharing that an old lock on a fence we passed belong to her older sister, who locked it there when she graduated high school. I asked Fazra to take a picture of the lock, and we talked about how original members of the community leave their mark on the neighbourhood and are able to remember the time before revitalization. This is just one example of the strong theme of memory that emerged during our tour. While showing me features of the revitalized neighbourhood, Amina and Fazra also pointed out what was not there: they would always mention which building or area once stood in that spot, including their own homes and some of their favourite places to play. For Fazra and Amina, community is most strongly associated with the old Regent.

One challenge we faced was narrowing our focus onto a specifically faith-related topic, one of our goals for this week. While we did begin to consider themes related to community, it became evident that we still need to find the link with faith that we want to explore. This said, we did start to consider the format we will use for our media project. Both Fazra and Amina are photographers, so we are looking into a photography-based (or possibly film-based) media project. We plan to solidify our topic at our next meeting.

For our first week, team Positive Space covered a lot of ground and made great progress towards figuring out our media project. This was enabled by Amina and Fazra’s openness and willingness to share so much of themselves and their community with me on our tour. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.

The Positive Space team members are Amine, Fazra, Daria and Jaime.