This past session marked our fourth week of working in groups, which means that we’re nearing the end of our class time. This is a bit daunting as there is still a lot of work left to do. We spent the majority of our time last night walking around Regent Park as a group taking photos of different locations that Sahara and Huda highlighted as being important to include in our zine. Right now there’s still a stark contrast across the built environment of the neighbourhood between new and old buildings that will be depicted throughout our project.
Esi, Huda & Sahara walking through remaining old buildings with newer ones pictured in the background.
Our main focus at present is on content creation, so that we will then be able to compile all of the different components of our project into actual zine format over the course of the next week. So far we’ve written an introduction, bios that position ourselves in relation to the community, a short piece about urban memory, and Sahara has written about her feelings based on an image prompt of the demolition. We’re working on creating a timeline that outlines the history of the neighbourhood, while getting Sahara and Huda to put together timelines that represent their own experiences in RP. We’ve also talked a lot about stigmatization of RP mostly by news media, so we plan to come up with a way to present this in our project – maybe some news headlines overlaid with counter narratives based on lived experience.
While we were on our walk this week, Huda pointed out that the doors of the public housing and private housing are different colours. As an outsider walking through the neighbourhood this could easily go unnoticed, it just looks like a design choice. But for residents of the community this is such an obvious and unnecessary marker of difference. On our way home, Sandy and I were talking about how something that appears so visually mundane, blue versus brown doors, functions as a kind of daily microaggression. For me, this reiterated that part of our project is about emphasizing that the built environment is not a passive backdrop to the happenings of the city, but instead is coded with all sorts of significance that shape relationships and social interaction. This I think speaks to our broader vision for the project, which is to carefully problematize how the old RP neighbourhood is being remembered in the midst of revitalization. In our zine we hope to create an accessible media piece that tells a less heard story of the neighbourhood, in opposition to the oversimplified and somewhat dichotomous representations that suggest it was a bad neighbourhood fixed by mixed income revitalization.
Note the different door colours
I think what we’re coming up against as a group right now is translating all of our ideas into tangible products, and figuring out how to meaningfully articulate the different components so that they flow and are cohesive. I think the best way overcome this is to focus on just getting stuff down that we can then go through and edit and format, and also by carefully managing our remaining time. Right now our goals are:
Continue researching and writing the various components of the project
cover page
preface
timeline(s)
organizing and inputting images
section about stigmatization
maps
Start formatting the zine layout
Create a (very) rough draft for next week
Gauge what we still need to do
Get a price quote from a print shop
Depending on where we’re at with the project we may want help from David next week on working with InDesign.
On an aside from what we’re doing in with our project, Mustafa The Poet (a Regent Park resident) just put together this video in collaboration with Drake that addresses gun violence in Toronto communities. It’s dealing with very different issues than what our project addresses, but it seemed important to flag as it’s also coming out of Regent Park and talking about themes of memory and stigma.
Members of Remembering Regent: Alex, Esi, Sandy, Huda, and Sahara