Revising, Revising and ... Revising

This week our group focused on tightening up and filling in what’s left for our zine. Alex, also known as our illustrator lover has been meticulously compiling the zine through Adobe Indesign. It is both as painstaking as it is rewarding. The software can be finicky, but Alex is working with it. Although our final draft is not yet finished we only have to add a few more sections consisting of how stigmatization affects the residents of Regent Park, along with news headlines and examples of such, bios of authors, fleshing out the timeline, and Huda and Sahara are still fine tuning their timelines and where they fit into the history of Regent Park.

An exclusive teaser of pages from our zine!

An exclusive teaser of pages from our zine!

image-2.png

This session we were successful in sitting down as a group and each of us working on our contributions. Esi worked on rewriting and writing a few sections on stigmatization and loss of sense of community, Alex valiantly battled InDesign, Sahara and Huda both worked on their timelines and bios, and Sandy shredded air on her penny board while taking more pictures throughout the neighborhood to note the difference between the older red brick buildings and the newer buildings and establishments in the area.

Our challenges this week lay in the fact our zine is very heavily writing based, so we have to make sure our writing is succinct, and clear without being overtly academic. It seems as though these three things together are difficult to capture. We all have to work to edit, edit, and edit. The time is pressing down on us so another one of our biggest challenges is making sure to use the next weeks wisely.

This week we also discussed what our final display at the aquatic centre recreation room will be like and everyone will have a role. The three U of T students will use their laptops as partial displays to describe different portions of the zine, and Sahara and Huda will go into detail with blown up posters featuring their contributions in the zine, in which Sahara talks about the demolitions and her life growing up in a state of flux, and Huda speaks in depth on her personal experiences on how the social divide manifests in Regent Park through the differentiation of the built form between private rental and owned units in Regent Park.

Another interesting thing that we discussed this week that was not quite related to the zine, was the reality of mixed income on a whole, and the way it further exacerbates social-economic divides. As the revitalization of Regent Park takes place, it isn’t the outsiders like us UofT students who feel it the most, but the residents. They’re the ones who notice it the most when high end stores like PaintBox pop up, or even chain stores like Wendy’s and when their neighbors are not quite as friendly as they used to be. Even if the revitalization offers plenty of new things to the area, we realize that the issue is complex and is reflected here in Regent Park in a unique way. Sahara and Huda remain our eyes and ears to the community and their lived experiences inform us in a way no academic article can.

Ultimately, although there is a lot of nuance in the idea of revitalization, our next few goals will be to finish the pages of our zine, edit until our eyes cross, print our copies and present at the showcase.

Members of Remembering Regent: Alex, Esi, Sandy, Huda, and Sahara