Sharing Regent Park: Reflections on Faith and the Built Form

May 9, 2020 Ron Ma

Our team of INI430 students, the Regent Turtles, were interested in studying how faith was reflected in the built environment of Regent Park, and how places of worship, in particular, integrate into the community. In order to answer these questions, we observed how five religious places in Regent Park share spaces with other institutions, such as non-religious schools, commercial businesses or even other places of worship. The importance of the urban issue we study is crucial because “for religious minorities, their religious buildings represent religious identity and power and are, therefore, linked to processes of emancipation or integration” (Verkaaik, 2013, p.8). Our mission is to support interfaith dialogue, through informing people from the Regent Park community, as well as those outside of it, on how the city of Toronto provides space for worship in Regent Park, and how those spaces are shared with other institutions. This is particularly important information, because a “variety of services, [including places of worship], has emerged in Toronto’s East Downtown because of the high concentration of low-income residents living there” (August, 2014, p.1323). We recognize the important connections between faith and community agency among low-income households, especially amid substantial impacts of recent urban change. While the built form was transformed by Regent Park’s revitalization project, houses of worship served as anchors in the neighbourhood, providing communities of faith with a continuity of organizing power and solidarity initiatives. But in also recognizing the many challenges that have arisen during the revitalization of Regent Park, have places of worship been appropriately accommodated similarly to community and civic institutions? This assessment of faith and non-faith spaces in the public sphere was important for us to analyze.

The approach our team used to study places of worship was to begin with field trips to the urban environments in which they were located. This was to observe their immediate surroundings, understand how building complexes operated in the neighbourhood, and determine how they interact with each other, as well as with other institutions in the vicinity. Once we had developed some reflections about these contexts, we sent interview questions using the publicly-available contact information to the houses of worship. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing measures in the region, this change to our information gathering occurred as we could no longer travel to Regent Park. Finally, with some changes to our final project, we supplemented our collected information with further online research regarding the churches and mosques of interest. After completing our research, out of the five worship places our team studied, only St. Bartholomew's Anglican and St. George's Macedonian Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Churches stand as separate buildings, without sharing space physically with other institutions. However, St Cyril & Methody Macedonian-Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox and St Silouan the Athonite Orthodox Churches are housed together in the same physical church space on 237 Sackville St, together with a non-religious pre-school. Although each institution has a different entrance, they still share one building complex and the yard around it. Two other mosques that we studied, Masjid Omar Al Khattab and Masjidur Rahmah, share a building complex with commercial stores, conveniences, and restaurants due to their location on the retail strip on Parliament Street at the western edge of the neighbourhood.

*Masjid Omar Bin Al-Khatab on Parliament Street, integrated with local businesses like ‘Hyderabad Palace’*

*Freestanding church building at 237 Sackville Street, housing both Sts. Cyril and Methody Eastern Orthodox Church, and St. Silouan Orthodox Church*

Our first ideas regarding our project landed at developing both a photo essay and a ‘guidebook’ for worship places in the Regent Park neighbourhood. With the theme of faith and the built environment, all four of us agreed that presenting the buildings themselves told the story most vividly. Regarding the intended exhibition at the end of the term, we also agreed that both media products should have physical copies, in order to be able to distribute them to community members in attendance. However, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and with the last half of the course moved online with social distancing orders in place, we decided to keep only the guidebook as our final product, and redirect our perspective from an analysis of securitization to the story of inclusion. Our guiding call became the question: “how do places of worship share space in the community?” This is an important question for understanding the role of faith in cities: in particular, how intersectional identities, like religion and culture, interact with and integrate into civic and neighbourhood institutions. These interactions form the basis for community residents to live in and experience the neighbourhood. We aimed to provide an introduction to those within and outside the community of the various places of worship in the neighbourhood from a creative perspective. In most cases, guidebooks serve as a tool for tourists traveling to a new locale. It is also recognized that including places of worship in such a guidebook serves as cultural recognition for the religions present in the area (Jacobs, 2001, p.309). By documenting the places of worship in our brochure, we can document the role faith plays in Regent Park as a neighbourhood. In our plan, the brochure should serve more than as part of a research project, but also a piece of community information to anyone interested in Regent Park and its practice of faith.

Thus, we aim for our project to serve two goals. The first is a critical reflection on how worship places share physical space in the neighbourhood. By answering this question, we are able to provide comprehensive insights into the role that each house of worship plays in the neighbourhood. Some of them offer their halls for rent to the community; some of them run events for people in the community, regardless of the faith they practice (or lack thereof); some of them share space with non-religious institutions; or even another religious congregation in the same building. In this special time of a global pandemic, the definition of ‘space’ has additionally expanded to include online space. As a result of this unique time, we also document various efforts each house of worship has attempted in providing online spaces for their regular attendees through the adoption of social media. The second goal of our project as a whole is to display and distribute information about these worship places to the general public as a means of fostering interfaith dialogue. The target audience of our brochure is residents of Regent Park interested in its religious composition, as well as others who are interested in the history of faith and cultural diversity in the city of Toronto. It is our hope that for residents of Regent Park, our guidebook provides new pieces of information about the places they might often walk by, but have not yet had the opportunity to visit and learn more about. Irrespective of their own practices of faith or of no faith, we believe that building community cohesion requires a firm understanding of those who comprise it, and the guidebook provides a detailed look into how the community comes together in ways unique to Regent Park itself.

*“Hall for rent” sign located outside the building of St. George’s Macedono-Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Church in Regent Park*

In producing this guidebook, amid the chaotic semester, our changing patterns of thought revealed much about how our perceptions of Regent Park had changed. With the first dialectic of securitization and inclusion that we began our research with, we often found ourselves focusing on the built form of religious institutions alone, without appreciating their context in the broader urban realm. Of course, this fell under standard research on securitization theory and the impact of social policies of state-centric “surveillance” particularly affecting the Muslim diaspora in communities of the West, like Toronto (Tiilikainen, 2005, p.53). However, Regent Park’s unique urban framework reveals more than this simplistic narrative. In focusing our later work on the ways in which spaces are inclusively shared, our understanding of the role of religion in urban space also expanded to include the conventional lifestyles associated with practicing faith. Spaces like schools, supermarkets, restaurants, and convenience stores became just as much a part of the story of faith in Regent Park as the houses of worship themselves. In some ways, this provided us with space to reflect on what it means to be a community member, and a citizen in civic, urban, and ethnocultural terms. To some extent, assuming these multiple identities is a complicated reality: the relationships residents form between their place of worship and neighbouring community hubs in Regent Park are a microcosm of Toronto’s larger negotiations of space in its multicultural aspirations.

To conclude this conversation on religion in Regent Park’s built form, it only seems appropriate to convey what the buildings tell us about where the neighbourhood is moving. Amid the rapid changes Regent Park is experiencing, its historic spaces of faith are shifting to provide new opportunities for community events and dialogue, and its newest spaces of faith are integrating themselves into the web of local institutions. In a neighbourhood representative of Toronto’s incredible diversity, there is no one story of religion in Regent Park. Successive generations of faith have negotiated and carved space to practice their faith in solidarity with their migrant communities in the neighbourhood, and as they have settled, those spaces have come to co-exist and create new connections. While they still perform the crucial role of supporting the unique spiritual needs of their respective communities, houses of worship are increasingly telling the story of Regent Park itself: a story that is dynamic, complex, ever-evolving, and most of all, accepting.

See the full guidebook here.

The Regent Turtles are Kamila, Rushay, Xinyi, and Huda.

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.

Jacobs, C. (2001). Folk for Whom? Tourist Guidebooks, Local Color, and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans. The Journal of American Folklore, 114(453), 309-330. doi:10.2307/542025

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

Tiilikainen, M. (2015). Looking for a Safe Place, Journal of Religion in Europe, 8(1), 51-72. doi: https://doi-org.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/10.1163/18748929-00801004

Verkaaik, O. (2013). Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives. In Verkaaik O. (Ed.), Religious Architecture: Anthropological Perspectives (pp. 7-24). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctt6wp6sx.3

Houses of Worship

March 13, 2020 Ron Ma

In our session this week as Regent Turtles, we used the time to dig deeper into our interest in the role of security in influencing the use of, and access to, the various houses of worship in Regent Park. Although we had decided on using photography as our primary medium last week, we had differing opinions on whether to arrange our photos into a photo essay, or expressing our ideas in a hypothetical tour guide or brochure of religious institutions in Regent Park. With our theme of security firmly in place, we felt the best way to express the dichotomies of what physical and community security entails, by deciding to do both! We’re now thinking of telling two stories: using the brochure, we want to share how religious houses of worship are advertising and sharing their space to the broader community for various uses while using the photo essay to demonstrate the challenges and infrastructure in place to protect these places. The resources we’ll need will primarily be covering printing costs, both for the brochure and the photo essay prints during our exhibition.

Since Huda was away this session, we decided to build up our level of research on the background and history of the churches and mosques in the neighbourhood, in order to get a better sense of how religious centres became embedded in the fabric of the community over time. As we went through the pictures we took last time, we found some interesting patterns. In terms of the churches, two are of the Macedono-Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox faith: Sts. Cyril and Methody Church at 237 Sackville Street, and St. George’s Church at 17 Regent Street. Both of them, as historic centres of the neighbourhood’s erstwhile Macedonian heritage in the early 20th century, had prominently displayed “hall for rent” signs on our walk last week, and upon further research, are available for community use for events ranging from weddings and corporate events to movie shootings and concerts. However, at Sts. Cyril and Methody, we also noticed a second church listed at the same address. As it turns out, St. Silouan Orthodox Church, founded recently in 2002 as a multi-ethnic place of worship, is also located in the same church building and opens on particular days for prayer. An interesting question about a multi-faith and multi-use presence in religious space is something we hope our pictures will discuss in the brochure.

St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church, located at 509 Dundas St. E, was closed when we walked by last week, as it primarily operates at midday during the week. In contrast to the limited times available among churches for prayer, the two mosques in the neighbourhood, Masjid Rahmah, and Masjid Omar Bin Al-Khattab were open for nearly all hours of the day to accommodate the full day of prayers in the Muslim faith. Both located on Parliament Street at the edge of Regent Park, the mosques are more integrated with commercial storefronts in their building locations. However, as we noticed last week, Masjid Omar Bin Al-Khattab, in particular, featured an extensive closed-circuit security system. We’re hoping to get in contact with these institutions over the next two weeks to clarify how these different forms of openness and protection each of the houses of worship is displayed. Of course, each house of worship aims to balance the need for community accessibility, while maintaining the safety of those attending prayer: understanding how each does so offers a unique perspective on religion in the built environment.

In addition to this research, we edited an earlier timeline of our goals in order to get prepared for upcoming work. Our table is below:

As we begin taking pictures next week, with Huda joining us again, we’re excited to get out into the neighbourhood and decide on the angles and views our pictures will assume. We’re also looking forward to starting to write our thoughts on how houses of worship serve as intersections of religion and the state, and how much of each interacts with the other in urban space here in Regent Park!

Maps showing Sts. Cyril and Methody and St. Silouan occupying the same physical building at Dundas and Sackville

The Regent Turtles are Kamila, Rushay, Xinyi, Huda.

Security and Surveillance within Religious Spaces

March 7, 2020 Ron Ma

During this week’s session, our team of Regent Turtles was able to get to know each other better with icebreaker activities, have a deeper understanding of the religious built environment of Regent Park through a walking tour, find several themes to choose from for the future project, and choose a type of media to work with.

The session started with us gathering in teams and doing the icebreaker activity. The activity challenged us to tell each other stories of our lives and write a sentence on it. This helped to locate the backgrounds our team members come from, what we are interested in and passionate about, as well as start the conversation about our lives outside of the school environment, which makes us more comfortable with each other in the process of project-making.

After the activity, our team decided to go to the field to explore spaces of religion and the context, in which those spaces locate because it allowed us to brainstorm on the themes across all the places of worship in Regent Park. We started the tour with St. George’s Macedonian Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Church, where the first thing we noticed was the poster with the inscription “hall for rent” on it. What we started wondering about is for what purposes the hall might be used, is it only for religious rituals or not? Then, we went up the stairs to find out that the church was closed, but on the staircase, we found a wrapped condom that talks about the poor management and lack of surveillance, despite the cameras located outside.

Hall For Rent at St. George’s and St. Silouan Churches

Found condom in front of St. George’s Church

On the way to the second location, we discovered two streets, St. David Street and Peaceful Way, which demonstrates religious importance in the community that we could potentially talk about the research. When we reached St. Silouan Orthodox Church, we noticed the sign for rent too. However, on top of “hall for rent,” the poster advertised space of the church for school renting purposes. This challenged us to ask questions of why the church would provide space for school purposes if it is not even religious? When we got closer to the church itself, we realized the part of it is already a private school, with its separate doors. The doors of the church were closed, but there was a schedule of religious events that the church is holding weekly, together with 10 AM Sunday services.

St. Bartholomew’s Anglican Church, where we travelled next, also had a list of events, with weekly Sunday services at 10:30 AM, while the church itself was also closed. The interesting object we discovered next to the trash bins of the church is the old event schedule on the panel that we later compared to the current one and came to the conclusion that there are more religious events now than there were before.

Our final stop was Masjid Omar Bin Khatab Mosque, which we had a chance to briefly glance at last week. This was the only place that was open because all the churches we visited were closed. Through the glass, we were able to observe people praying on the first floor, while on the second floor we noticed a room with a TV screen of the security camera footage. The broader questions that we started to explore were the surveillance and how they preserve the sacred space in places of worship in the community of Regent Park? If it was evident that the mosque had strict surveillance, we were not sure about the churches we visited before because the existence of security cameras there does not provide safety, as we found a piece of vandalism in the form of a condom on the church staircase. What does it talk about the church’s security?

Found event board at St. Bartholomew’s church

Security cameras that are seen through the glass

When we came back to the classroom, we had all those ideas and were motivated to start the project as soon as possible because we went to the field and observed all the issues with the religious built environment and its surroundings. However, the difficulty that we faced was to find one theme that we want to explore, instead of having a list of them. After a long discussion, our team succeeded to end up with studying the questions of security and surveillance within the religious spaces, while connecting it to the usage of space and control the worship places have over the public safety and accessibility. This session’s experience led us to the decision that we want to work with photography, so for the future week, we plan to explore more on the spaces we already visited with a surveillance theme in mind, as well as collecting historical data and photographs. When it came to the question of the media piece, we want to collect data first and then see how we can incorporate photography into a magazine, tour guide, photo essay or classifieds.

Here is the timeline of our project:

The Regent Turtles are Kamila, Rushay, Xinyi, Huda.

Regent Turtle

February 28, 2020 Ron Ma

During this week’s session, we worked as a team for the first time: we did a Regent Park walking tour with the Diva girls, named our team, and started exploring the direction of our future project.

After the ice-breaking game with all classmates and Diva Girls, we had around 40 minutes to tour around the area. The time is unexpectedly short because our Diva girl, Huddinie has endless personal stories to tell about every single spot we passed by. The tour started from the basket field. While the surrounding residential buildings have changed over-time, this space, and an Anglican Church right next to it remain unchanged over time. Huddinie also mentioned her home was right across the street, where the townhouses located in the picture. The basketball field, though poorly maintained, is the centre of Regent Park youth for her.

Then it was Parliament Street, where restaurants and convenience stores gather and where people in the area hang out. The Diva Girls know every store: who runs it, how long it has been there, who visit certain stores… We were impressed when she explained how each convenience stores differ from each other with the source of goods and customers. A Mosque called Masjid Omar Bin Al-Khattab sits right next to the stores. Compared to the three churches in the same area, this Mosque is rather difficult to notice with its tiny dome. According to Huddinie, before the Mosque was renovated, it was at the underground of a restaurant, and the space was extremely small, especially for girls. Furthermore, she mentioned the two Mosques in the area serve Islams with different ethics.

It was funny that we spent way too much time on Parliament Street so that we had to rush to Regent Park and only can have a sneak peek of the park itself. On the southern side of Regent Park are the new condos and Daniel Spectrum. And on the other side, there are the last few old buildings waiting to be demolished in the short future.

Our heads were full of stories and personal anecdotes on our way back to the classroom. None of us had good suggestions on the team name until we saw the traffic signage before we go back to the classroom. Besides the funny turtle figure, we found the idea of ‘calmed community’ resonates with our idea about using media tools as a means of documentation and reflection. Because we have a focus of faith and built environment, it’s really cool that our team name actually comes from the built environment of the neighborhood. The turtle is also an analogy of us slowly getting out of the shell and gradually get to see the surroundings.

Through our project, we want to record the built spaces in Regent Park, some of them are under rapid transitions and looks totally different 5 years ago, and some of them stay for decades. Also, we want to discover how built spaces are able to embrace residents’ faith, for example, how Masjid Omar Bin Al-Khattab managed to grow from underground to have its own building.

The tour with Diva Girls was amazing, we get to know their personal stories, feel their love and knowledge towards the neighborhood and local residents. We are now much more familiar with the area and ready to dive deeper through the project.

The Regent Turtle team members are Huda, Kamila, Xinyi, and Rushay.