Before reading week, we came up with the name RE-VISIT for our group, which consists of Regent Park Resident Abdirahman and two UofT students, Ashwini and Roya. At the time we had a vague idea of what we wanted our project to be. Mainly focusing on this idea of sharing narratives about places in Regent Park, we wanted our project to capture stories of the places people call home. Despite juggling different ideas, the group’s collective vision for the project was to create a body of work that empowered people to visit and re-visit the neighborhood with narratives from folks who make up its vibrancy.
Our group’s brainstorm
After a week’s rest, our team met up to brainstorm and refine our project idea. Going into the meeting we had three goals in mind:
Define what civic engagement means to us and our project.
Develop a question that all residents, new or old, would have an answer to.
Decide what form we want our project to take.
We deliberated on how we could communicate the essence of the neighborhood without isolating anyone. We also wanted to create an opportunity for participation that would evoke a sense of belonging at Regent Park. Therefore, the research question guiding our project is: How do you take a built form and make it your own?
Goal 1
With constant change in the built environment, the built form of Regent Park being developed today is quite new to all residents in the neighborhood. The new reality has placed new and old residents at uncomfortable odds. We had to ask ourselves what purpose our project would serve the community. Also, with civic engagement as the central tenet of the project, we had to brainstorm a balance that would truly engage all residents of the community.
Goal 2
Next, we brainstormed a list of questions we could ask Regent Park residents to capture their neighborhood and create some sense of placemaking. After running through a few, we decided to keep it simple and stick with: What is your favorite spot in Regent Park?
We chose this question because we thought it would prompt an organic response that would show us where people have found their comfort within the neighborhood. The potential for overlap in favorite spots would also be an opportunity for people to come together and think about ways in which they are similar, at a time when differences have taken center stage.
Goal 3
One thing we struggled with during our brainstorming process was finding a connection between all our different ideas. On one of our first days, Abdi came forward with an amazing project idea concerning the digital divide, but we also wanted to experiment with QR codes and augmented reality. These ideas were pretty much polar opposites, but we still wanted to see how we can bridge them together.
We decided to have a website as our main form of media but also create a physical version as a welcoming gift or album-like print copy of all our potential stories. We reckoned with the fact that much of community media, or opportunities for civic engagement are largely available on digital platforms now. Since we were taken with the idea about bridging digital divide, we want to expand our narrative collection process to include more in-person methods like through word of mouth, physical notes or printed forms into mailboxes.
The nature of this week’s session was to brainstorm and have a clear understanding of what we want our media project to do - which we think we accomplished. Going into next week, we are excited to begin gathering answers and seeing where they lead us to.
The RE-VISIT team members are Abdirahman, Ashwini, and Roya