Regent Park’s revitalization has been contentious since it began in 2005. In addition to the discourse surrounding its physical redevelopment, much has been said about the Social Development Plan (SDP), which aims to bring employment, training, and economic development opportunities to the community. Many of the discussions we had in class focused on the revitalization’s shortcomings, such as the usage of a diversity narrative to mask how social mixing harms community cohesion (Mele, 2019, p. 35) or the lack of interactions between TCHC tenants and market-rate residents (Bucerius et al., 2017, pp. 493-494). We also heard stories on how residents are not taken seriously during SDP consultations.
These examples are emblematic of what Arnstein (1969) calls “tokenism” in public participation (p. 219); residents are allowed, even encouraged, to participate, but have little impact on the results of revitalization. Other accounts of the revitalization, however, emphasize the role of resident leadership and community power driving the SDP forward and the success of social mixing (Brail et al, 2021; Hayes, 2016). To reconcile these perspectives, we wanted to produce a documentary consisting of interviews with Regent Park residents and community leaders. We ask:
How do community leaders see the SDP?
To what extent are Regent Park actually residents involved in the SDP?
What is the future of the SDP?
We aimed to identify those within Regent Park who are indifferent to or not engaged with the SDP and to explore the reasons behind this. We also sought to dive deeper into the topic of community involvement in Regent Park, both in the past and surrounding the SDP. As we began putting together the documentary, we realized most of our interviewees preferred speaking to resident engagement around the SDP and the current revitalization rather than past community actions in Regent Park. We found that attempting to include both the history of community involvement and the future of the SDP diluted our documentary’s focus since we were unable to thoroughly investigate either topic in a 20-minute span.
A secondary aim of our project was to document the SDP for posterity. Ismail, who is heavily involved in the SDP both on the community side and the City of Toronto side, was interested in preserving the history of the SDP in an accessible form. We saw this as a manifestation of the “right to research” one’s own community and issues that affect one’s life (Appadurai, p. 168, 2006). We chose to pursue this project as a community project instead of academic research or as an exercise in filmmaking. This meant leveraging Regent Park resources, like Ismail’s connections with various SDP actors or FOCUS Media Arts’ footage, instead of using more traditional research methods like academic articles or formal interviews. We hoped this would make the documentary more personal and informative for both Ismail and the community.
Our Documentary as Community Media
We see our documentary as a form of community media building upon the work of FOCUS Media Arts. Civic media can be thought of as a form of communication that promotes civic engagement among a specific community and stands independent from the state and market (Carpentier et al., 2010, pp. 55-56; Zhang, 2018). Some formulations of community media see it as inherently antagonistic to political-economic institutions (Carpentier et al., 2010, p. 61), but we do not. Specifically, the documentary’s attitude on the SDP, a plan heavily influenced by state and market actors, was determined by the attitudes of community leaders in Regent Park. We attempted to juxtapose the diversity of opinions in conversation with each other to highlight their similarities and differences.
Some parts of our documentary did challenge The City, Daniels, and Tridel to do better; for example, we showed residents describing the problems with the SDP framework and the lack of engagement from market residents. We also challenged the “rhetoric of stigmatization” that justified Regent Park’s revitalization and portrayed The City and developers as ‘saving’ Regent Park residents from crime and poverty (August, 2014). By highlighting the voices of commuting leaders’ active role in leading the SDP, we presented the SDP as an institution shared between residents, The City, and developers, rather than a framework forced upon Regent Park by hegemonic planners. Had we been antagonistic to the SDP before even beginning work on our documentary, we may have produced a narrative that takes away agency from residents by showing them as victims of the SDP rather than active participants.
Other parts of our documentary highlighted the positive outcomes of the SDP. Although many of these were won by residents and community organizations, some respondents did mention the positive impact of outside actors. Ines, for example, mentioned that she appreciated that the City was doing an “SDP refresh” to mediate tensions between residents despite her outspoken opposition to many of the City’s actions. Having seen the benefits of the SDP, we also chose to include a call to action in our documentary to encourage more residents to participate.
What We Learned
Since this was the first time any of us made a documentary, we learned a lot about the art of filmmaking, including technical skills (how to set up the equipment, how to edit, how to find footage, etc.) and effective storytelling. At first, it was hard to figure out what story we wanted to tell and how we could tell that story cohesively. We got a better understanding of what was important to include given our time constraints; after many iterations and consulting with Aditi and Adonis, we cut our sections that explained the history of Regent Park and instead began our documentary by contextualizing the SDP. We also understood the difficulty of stitching many interviews together into a cohesive narrative; cohesiveness required us to select specific quotes, cutting, deleting, and adding clips as necessary to test different storytelling flows.
Our research findings somewhat confirmed our initial beliefs. There were indeed major problems with the SDP, such as a lack of resident involvement, power imbalances, and personal tensions within the community hamstringing cohesion. We captured a diversity of opinions on the SDP, ranging from deeply critical to overwhelmingly positive. Most residents were uncertain about the future, with some believing that the SDP needed a refresh while others believed that the SDP needed to be replaced entirely. Following the theme of power, we noticed hints of entrepreneurial behavior or ‘entrepreneurial logic,’ whereby development processes reward “citizens who are active, enthusiastic, flexible, communicative, and committed to finding innovative solutions to society's problems” (Stapper & Duyvendak, 2020). As one of the most researched neighborhoods in North America, Regent Park is no stranger to media and political discourse. In this respect, certain residents (appear to) leverage Regent Park’s notoriety to (1) advance their authority in the social development process, and (2) claim the mantle of the neighborhood’s official spokesperson(s). Residents achieve this through challenging the legitimacy of the participatory process itself, (as well as the developers and city), helping assert themselves as the legitimate voices of the community and enlisting the support of politicians and press. What can happen, however, is that when a fraction of the community positions themselves as the de facto voice of the neighborhood, it may sideline residents who lack similar leverage and influence within the participatory framework.
Amidst these differences, however, there seemed to be a common set of facts that drove residents’ frustrations with the SDP; even respondents with very different views on the SDP agreed that the fundamental issues were lack of engagement from the market side and personal tensions. We hope that our documentary can help alleviate this by increasing resident engagement with the SDP and cement control in the hands of the broader community, rather than a select few that choose to be engaged.
View the project here:
The SDP Champions at the final exhibit
The SDP Champions team members are Asae, Ismail, Jacob, and Jackson
References
Appadurai, A. (2006). The right to research. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 4(2), 167–177. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767720600750696
Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225
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. https://doi.org/10.1068/a45635
Brail, S., Lorinc, J., St. Louis-McBurnie, K., Sanz Tovar, L. (2021). Regent Park: A progress Report. https://metcalffoundation.com/publication/regent-park-a-progress-report/
Bucerius, S. M., Thompson, S. K., & Berardi, L. (2017). “They’re Colonizing My Neighborhood”: (Perceptions of) Social Mix in Canada. City & Community, 16(4), 486–505. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12263
Carpentier, N., Lie, R., & Servaes, J. (2010). Community Media: Muting the democratic media discourse? Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.), 17(1), 51–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/1030431022000049010
Hayes, D. (2016, December 8). Inside Regent Park: Toronto’s test case for Public-Private Gentrification. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/dec/08/inside-regent-park-torontos-test-case-for-public-private-gentrification
Mele, C. (2019). The strategic uses of race to legitimize “social mix” urban redevelopment. Social Identities, 25(1), 27–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2017.1418603
Stapper, E. W., & Duyvendak, J. W. (2020). Good residents, bad residents: How participatory processes in urban redevelopment privilege entrepreneurial citizens. Cities, 107, 102898-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102898
Zhang, J. (2018, January 11). Defining civic media – MIT Center for Civic Media. https://civic.mit.edu/index.html%3Fp=26.html