The Project?
Our group, Remembering Regent, focused efforts on memorializing Regent Park in a way that felt true to residents of the community, and especially to our Diva Girls, Sahara and Huda. Their interests and experiences informed the direction our project went in. We used a ‘zine’ as the format for our project. Zine is short for fanzine, and is a kind of self-published, do-it-yourself magazine that often is used to foreground and circulate less heard narratives and knowledges (Creasap, 2014). Some featured topics include the effects of social polarization on residents, a loss of a sense of community, and ultimately, how the revitalized RP differs from the old neighbourhood.
The Medium?
We chose the medium of a zine because of its informal and participatory character, coupled with the possible openness of its mixed-media content. This fit well with our project’s theme of memorialization, in which we included pictures of new and old buildings, writing that contextualizes the history of RP and the revitalization process, along with words from Sahara and Huda. We believe that the incorporation of text, photographs and drawings are some of the most common forms of remembrance, and we hope that through our zine we have preserved an image of RP that bespeaks how incumbent residents would view their community.
The Issue?
Our group aimed to address the different ways a community is remembered and what voices carry through and shape these processes. Memorialization can reflect a community’s shared experiences and values, as they are embedded within urban spaces, but it can be something that is unsolicited and thrusted upon them (Unlu, 2019). In the case of Regent Park, the neighbourhood’s stigma, and the subsequent raze and rebuild methodology of the urban redevelopment project suggests that memories of this neighbourhood speak more to the latter. The pre-revitalization community fought a constant battle against the negative perceptions of Regent Park that saw the neighbourhood as, among other things ‘isolated’, and ‘crime infested’ (August, 2014; Purdy, 2004). For example, the reports of gang violence and danger in the neighborhood are often exaggerated while little to no emphasis is placed on the positive things happening across the community (see Hayes, 2016; Landau, 2019; Starr, 2014). Often times news stories concerning Regent Park that have nothing to do with crime or danger will work the stigma of the neighbourhood into the conversation regardless. The revitalization discourse then becomes a way for others to mention just how far Regent Park has come, when that is often not an accurate representation of how residents are actually feeling.
As a group we thus sought to address the uneven balance between whose voices are lifted up and which ones are stamped down. Our Regent Park residents are sixteen-year-old Huda and fourteen-year-old Sahara, and they act as our eyes and ears to the neighborhood. We strove to build our zine around their thoughts and contributions.
The Goal?
The goal of our project is to create a tangible memory of Regent Park as seen through the zine text. This memory manifests most authentically through Sahara and Huda’s voices, which is why their input is so crucial to our project. When Sahara mentions how the demolition makes her feel it is emblematic of how many other residents may also be experiencing these changes, and when Huda discusses the divide between the different income groups, they are likewise first hand observations that are telling of how disparities play out in the urban form. Ultimately, we wanted to translate these feelings and observations into something tangible that would uplift the voices of the Diva Girls and situate them within broader theory about how revitalization processes shape city space. The zine is a kind of time capsule that aims to remember not only how Regent Park used to be but how its residents see and remembered it in the midst of revitalization.
What Did We Learn?
One of the most unique aspects of INI430 was our involvement with Regent Park Focus and the Divas Girls Group. Many Urban Studies courses discuss Regent Park’s Revitalization and community involvement in such projects, but few UofT classes work with residents who have been directly impacted by them. It was our privilege to work with the RPF girls, who told us about their stories and experiences, and also about the subtle injustices embedded throughout their neighborhood that academic literature written about Regent Park struggles to depict.
A really important takeaway from creating our project is that residents’ lived experiences take an entirely different lens to revitalization project than the narratives found across news media and in some cases academic literature. The high school students in our group are not imparting an ideologically embedded experiences, instead, they are calling things as they see them. Even when academic writing takes a critical approach to understanding revitalization projects like Regent Park’s, it often still falls short of capturing the nuance of residents’ experiences in the same way that directly engaging with them does.
Huda and Sahara may not have known about the theory surrounding mixed income housing at the beginning of our project but they verbalized and spoke about things that fall in line with it perfectly. Sahara frequently discussed the loss of sense of place using her own language, and Huda’s observations of the ways that the built form represents the differences between higher income and lower income show that residents have a keen sense of these divides. Huda’s piece in particular spoke to how social mixing as a way to deconcentrate poverty is more so a financial project, rather than a social one, so, naturally, social polarization develops (August, 2014). This reiterates Martine August’s (2014) work about Regent Park, throughout which she argues that mixed income developments are first and foremost vehicles for opening up profitable land in city’s downtown areas.
Additionally, we also had to continuously reflect on our own positionalities throughout the project and consider the ways that our own thoughts and biases played a part in shaping the outcome of the zine. Over the course of the creation process, our insights and arguments were constantly informed by Sahara and Huda because at the end of the day they know their community best. Because we the UofT students were in charge of the majority of production and editing for the project, there was a fine balance to figuring out how to accurately situate their experiences, while also backing it up with existing theory and research. In a lot of ways this project was very humbling, because even though we have taken many courses that discuss urban renewal and revitalization projects such as the one occurring in Regent Park, the Regent Park residents know their community best and they will always be the experts on their community.
Check out our zine here.
References
August, M. (2014). Challenging the Rhetoric of Stigmatization: The Benefits of Concentrated Poverty in Toronto’s Regent Park. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 46(6), 1317–1333. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45635
Creasap, K. (2014). Zine-Make as a Feminist Pedagogy. Feminist Teacher, 24(3), 155-168.
Shaw, K. S. and Hagemans, I. W. (2015), ‘Gentrification Without Displacement' and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low‐income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas. Int J Urban Regional, 39: 323-341. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.12164
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), 519-148.
Unlu, T. S. (2019). Urban memory and planning: investigating the use of oral history. European Planning Studies, 27(4), 802-817.
Members of Remembering Regent are Alex, Esi, Sandy, Huda, and Sahara.
