The Multi-Dimensional Histories of Displacement and Social Mixing in Regent Park

The Social Fixers: About Us

The Social Fixers are a group of students from the University of Toronto that includes Erika, Sayem and Lena, and Samira from the Diva Girls at Regent Park Focus. At first glance, our  group name offers a clear hint on what our topic is in the creation of our media project. It stems from a succinct play on words to the concept of ‘social mixing’, despite the fact that we do not intend on ‘fixing’ the issues stemming from the planning practice that serves as the root of our project. Social mixing planning exercises have increasingly been employed by city governments as a band-aid solution to issues of concentrated poverty, and social stigmatization of low-income, racialized groups, such as those residing in the Regent Park neighbourhood (Brail and Kumar, 2017). As such, our group name is representative of this sort of neoliberal ideology as a method of internal critique of planning practices as they stand today.

From left to right: Samira, Sayem, Lena. Missing: Erika. (Photo by Romi Levine, University of Toronto News)

For our media project, our group is looking at the processes of displacement, moving and social mixing in Regent Park. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Human Geography, displacement can be defined as “the forcing out of long-established and working-class residents of a city” (Castree, Kitchin and Rogers, 2013). While displacement is most commonly associated with gentrification, our project will show that, in the case of Regent Park, many locals are experiencing ‘gentrification without displacement’. The term, coined by Shaw and Hagemans (2015), exemplifies “a benign process of ‘positive gentrification’ in which middle-class in-movers are not pushing low-income residents out of the neighbourhood but, through filling vacancies or increasing housing densities, are expanding the total population so that the proportion but not the absolute number of low-income residents declines” (p.324). For Regent Park residents, this has meant a disruption in their sense of community through the introduction of middle and high income individuals who continue to perpetuate stigmatizations and misunderstanding of Regent Park’s low-income, racialised residents (Bucerius et al., 2017).

This process, most commonly defined as ‘social mixing’, generally refers to the “balance between social housing renters, homeowners and private renters, and middle-income and low-income residents in a particular spatially defined area,” (Arthurson, 2012, p.2). The planning practice of socially mixing communities “is assumed to result in improved socio-economic outcomes for low-income residents through: sharing of information and resources between people of different socio-economic status; a stronger sense of social control through greater accountability among community members; positive behaviour change through role modelling and mentorship between people of different socio-economic status; and higher quality local services and infrastructure through stronger collective efficacy” (Brail and Kumar, 2017; Joseph et al., 2007). Social mixing, however, has often led low-income residents to feel underrepresented and as if the built and social environments of their community are no longer reflective of themselves, their families, friends and peers. Through the creation of a media project that provides a platform for the ‘lost voices’ in the Regent Park community, we hope to shine light upon the different experiences related to revitalization and its effects on different groups.

Interactive Timeline: A Tool for Collective Memory

Our group chose to create a timeline as a working tool of collective memory that challenges the narratives constructed by outside actors about Regent Park. In the timeline, we tell the story of Regent Park through multiple lenses, such as Samira’s life and her relationship to place, academic literature, news media, and government & corporate documents.

We chose to create a timeline for a variety of reasons. Primarily, we wanted to be able to tell the story of Samira’s relationship to spaces and places in Regent Park over time. This was important to Samira because the places that are meaningful to her in Regent Park have and continue to disappear as a result of the revitalization. She explains in the interview activity we conducted with her that she feels her memory of the Regent Park she and her family have called home for many years has slowly faded and will continue to over time. This brings to light the concerning effects that social mixing policies can have in residents’ perceptions of home, and sense of security in familiar places. As Shaw and Hagemans (2015) address, “Changes in one’s position in the neighbourhood structure — one’s ‘place identity’ — and in government interventions, initiated by different groups with different interests, can contribute to a sense of loss of stability and control, and similarly constitute a type of displacement” (p.326). As a result of her loss of sense of place, Samira has often felt that Regent Park does not represent home but, rather, just a place to live.

As such, we decided to create a project that not only outlined Samira’s experiences of the revitalization, but also highlighted the experiences of the community at large. We elected to make the timeline an interactive one, incorporating a section titled Your Story, where community members are able to add their own experiences directly to our project, thereby bringing to light the multitudes of voices present in Regent Park, and that continue to be affected by the ongoing revitalisation. Our group felt that a lot of work occurs from a point of view that tends to be detached from community perspectives, especially within the academic planning context. As a result, we found it to be of great importance to make these perspectives the highlight of our project.

Intersectional Identities Make for Unique Stories: Understanding Our Goal

Through the creation of our timeline our goal is not to create an analysis tool that seeks to explain why Regent Park is talked about or engaged with in a myriad of ways; rather, our goal is to simply outline how the histories of displacement and social mixing in Regent Park have been largely multi-dimensional. As a result of the intersectional identities of all [positively or negatively] impacted by the Regent Park redevelopment, the ways in which each person experiences the revitalization will greatly differ. Samira’s experiences show her perspective of the ways her life has changed as a direct result of the revitalisation. From the loss of memory, to detachments from a sense of home and the intentions of the city and developers, Samira’s experiences show us a very specific side of Regent Park’s revitalization — one where the development’s intended effects do not translate and change form into something more drastic. Our additional focus on community voices display a varied number of perspectives, where some members welcome the new changes to the community, while others remain ambivalent and untrusting of city planners and the Daniels corporation.

Academic vs. On-the-Ground Knowledge: Learning from Locals

Swathes of academic literature have attempted to understand the effects of social mixing on low-income and racialized communities, especially within the North American context, with a specific focus on Regent Park as a case study for these effects (Brail and Kumar, 2017; Bucerius, et al., 2017; Johnson and Schippling, 2009; Laughlin and Johnson, 2011). In addition, an increasing amount of scholars have identified the lack of community perspectives within this literature, and as such, have attempted to fill these gaps through community interviews (Brail and Kumar, 2017; Laughlin and Johnson, 2011). However, beyond the simple inclusion of community voices, there has recently been a particular interest for the involvement of youth perspectives on Regent Park’s revitalization (Bucerius, et al., 2017; Johnson and Schippling, 2009; Laughlin and Johnston, 2011). In the case of Regent Park, youth aged 18 and under make up over 50% of the neighbourhood’s population, 20% higher than Toronto’s 30% average (Ibrahim, 2010). In addition, these same youth often act as translators and liaisons for their parents who may need assistance in understanding the revitalization processes as employed by the city and Daniels Corporation (Laughlin and Johnston 2011; Johnson and Schippling, 2009). As such, the voices of youth, especially in the Regent Park context, are pertinent to include within the academic literature which informs so much of how we come to understand urban planning processes. In an academic context where such voices are traditionally absent or left out, filling in these key gaps is crucial if we hope to realize more just outcomes in the planning and study of our cities.

Check out our completed timeline here.

References

Arthurson, K. (2012). Social mix and the city: Challenging the mixed communities consensus in housing and urban planning policies. Collingwood, Vic: CSIRO Publishing.

Brail, S., and Kumar, N. (2017). Community leadership and engagement after the mix: The transformation of Toronto’s Regent Park. Urban Studies, 54(16), 3772-3788.

Bucerius, S.M., Thompson, S.K., and Berardi, L. (2017). “They’re Colonizing My Neighbourhood”: (Perceptions of) Social Mix in Canada. City & Community, 16(4), 486-505.

Castree, N., Kitchin, R., and Rogers, A. (2013). Displacement. In A Dictionary of human geography (1st ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hackworth, J. (2018). Gentrification as a Politico-Economic Window: Reflections On The Changing State of Gentrification. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 110(1), 47-53.

Ibrahim, S. (2010). Regent Park: Community Resources and Needs Assessment. Toronto Centre for Community Learning and Development. Retrieved from: http://www.tccld.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/RegentPark_2009-10_CRNA.pdf

Johnson, S. C., and Schippling, R. (2009). Regent Park Revitalization: Young People’s Experience of Relocation from Public Housing Redevelopment. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Retrieved from: http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2011/schl-cmhc/nh18-1-2/NH18-1-2-50-2009-eng.pdf

Joseph, M., Chaskin, R., and Webber, H. (2007). The theoretical basis for addressing poverty through mixed income development. Urban Affairs Review, 3(42), 369–409.

Kelly, S. (2013). The New Normal: The Figure of the Condo Owner in Toronto’s Regent Park. City & Society, 25(2), 173-194.

Laughlin, D. L., & Johnson, L. C. (2011). Defining and exploring public space: perspectives of young people from Regent Park, Toronto. Children’s Geographies, 9(3-4), 439-456.

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. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(2), 323-341. Smith, N. (2002). New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy. Antipode, 34(3), 427-450.

The Social Fixers are Erika, Lena, Sayem and Samira.

Memes as ‘Self-Care’, Story Maps and Accessibility

This week, at the beginning of class, we learned that the CEO of Daniels Corporation may be attending the showcase of our final projects in two weeks. This was very shocking news, which caused us some anxiety, as many of our projects critique the ongoing revitalization in Regent Park. As we digested the news, we decided to translate these anxieties into humour by putting the tips and advice we received a few weeks prior during our meme-making workshop to good use. We made a meme that shows our experiences in the class thus far, but it was also our team’s reaction to Aditi’s news. Making the meme helped relieve the tension for our team and acted as a ‘de-stressing’ exercise, almost like a form of ‘self-care’.

As we fast-approach the deadline for our final showcase, we are becoming more and more excited with the look of our final project. Since we had such a productive work session last week, this week was really about putting together all of the research we did for content relating to Regent Park (including news media, film, academic literature reviews, and government document research). We aimed to work with the rough draft of our timeline to work on our final draft, including cutting out information that was redundant, sorting through our photos that will tell a coherent and interesting story, and editing what we hope to be the final version of our timeline.

As of now, the content of our timeline will be categorized into various sections, so that viewers can read and view different kinds of information according to their interests. The piece will be split into two sections, with the timeline running across the middle of both sections. On the top half of the line, we will be telling Samira’s story. This will be done by sharing Samira’s physical presence in and relationship to places in Regent Park over her lifetime (e.g. where she lived and when, where she went to school and when, etc.); highlighting important quotes from the interview we conducted with her a few weeks prior, and documenting the photographs that Samira took with the disposable camera we provided of the spaces that were meaningful to her and her family. The bottom half of the timeline will tell the story that news media, filmmakers, academics, government officials, and Toronto Community Housing Corporation have told about Regent Park over time. As we want this to be a piece that shows that the histories of displacement and social mix in Regent Park are unique for all individuals, as we all have very distinct intersectional identities, and they each tell a different story, we will be including a section at the bottom of our piece where viewers can share via ‘post-its’ their story. The interactions of the public with our piece can be in relation to the spaces we’ve documented in our project, Samira’s story, the quotes from any literature we reviewed, or anything viewers may feel like sharing.

To complement our final piece, we have also decided on including a story map that will embed parts of the story told on the timeline, as well as more specific information relating to the parts of the story we are telling on a single web-page. This story map will include the trailers of the documentaries we included, specific information relating to the spaces and places in Regent Park, an interactive map of the physical geography of Regent Park, and more.

While we are very proud of the progress that we have made thus far, we were disappointed Samira could not make it to our session today. We were excited to show her the work we have done over the last few weeks to get her input on it, so we can make modifications to improve our final product. We look forward to sharing it with her next week, as it is our final week to work on the piece before printing.

As we have worked on going through the content we have collected over the past two weeks, we came to realize that some of it is not very accessible to your average person. First, a lot of the literature we examined was obtained through the University of Toronto Libraries website — a very useful resource for university students. Besides news articles, most of the information communicated in these sources had a particular vocabulary that is difficult to understand if one is not familiar with it. This got us thinking, and allowed us to come up with an idea that will help us make the content of our final projects more accessible to all. To make sure that our project is accessible to people of all ages, we are hoping to collaborate with Remember Regent to include in the zine a glossary of key terms and words that we feel are important to our project, as well as the other groups’. We hope to also create a sheet that can be circulated at the showcase, as it will be useful for our guests to carry the sheets with them as they walk around the space. These keywords will have definitions that help explain to viewers what they mean in a simplified, non-academic language, which will be useful for those who little to no understanding of the jargon.

The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.

Communication Is Key

This week was a very productive week for the Social Fixers for a variety of reasons — we were able to solidify our project to get a complete sense of direction for our final piece, we were able to communicate with each other to clear up any misunderstandings between group members about our plans, and we also continued to make progress on our work with Samira.

This session, in particular, added another layer to the project through Samira’s drawings. We re-did one of the first activities we did as a class collectively in the first couple of weeks working with the Diva Girls that Samira was not present for. This activity was the one facilitated by Aditi, where we were to draw a map of how we got to where we were that day. This could be a an actual representation of our commute to where we were in that point in time, or it could be an artistic interpretation of how we got to where we were in that moment either mentally or emotionally. The task on Monday was to create drawings of the neighbourhood from Samira’s perspective, highlighting the places and buildings that are most memorable to her, either because she visits them constantly or because she enjoys them. We would have liked to advance more this session, but without realizing it, it was time to say goodbye. Samira made a great deal of progress during class time, however she took the map home in order to work on it more thoroughly throughout the week.

One of Samira’s highlights in Regent Park is this location. Her friend, who she was often able to visit, lived in this building before relocation. Post-relocation, she and her friend are not able to see each other as often.

This week, specifically, we have noticed that time goes too fast with each session while the deadline approaches. While Samira was drawing, the rest of the group members continued to work on research on social mixing and displacement, transcription of previous interviews with Samira, and we also continued with new questions about her experience in Regent Park. As our deadline fast-approaches, we see the need to be more hands-on with the way we approach our work sessions, as well as our time outside of class to ensure that we are making enough progress with our outside research and work during the week.

As previously mentioned, a specific reason why this session was successful and productive was that we clarified certain doubts among the group members, not including Samira. On occasion, due to a lack of communication or clarity, we have found that we have each interpreted our task division and our understanding of our final project differently. Having the chance to properly communicate with each other, we established in more detail the format in which our timeline is going to be structured, and what we must have ready for next week as a draft for Aditi. Additionally, we indicated a certain level of flexibility and possible changes that can occur to the project in these next couple of weeks if we find ourselves with lack of time. For example, originally, we were going to make an interactive online timeline and also a physical display.

Depending on our progress, we may decide to focus exclusively on the physical for the final presentation. If time permits, we will create a simplified version of our physical timeline that can be accessed on mobile devices for guests to see at our final showcase.

Another piece of progress we made this week on our final project was to complete taking photos with our disposable camera that show the spaces and places that have significant meaning to Samira in Regent Park. After completing the photography part, we got the photos developed and have included them here for readers to view our progress and see some of Samira’s highlights.

A particular image of interest for Samira, which shows a stark difference between old and new, just within one block in Regent Park.

While we keep trying to discover certain stories about Samira and understand more about her lived experiences in Regent Park, it becomes clearer that the old Regent Park is an elusive memory, as all of her life has been surrounded by demolitions and reconstructions, making it difficult to recognize stability. Up to this point, it is not clear what the effects have been on Samira, since life in constant change is her normality.

The Old Regent Park

The New Regent Park

The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.

Team Work Makes the Dream Work

This week, one of the goals for our group was to build upon our external research and further our understanding of Samira’s perspectives on the revitalization. We continued our walking tours of Regent Park with Samira, collecting more and more pictures of the neighbourhood as we went along, particularly focusing on places that are or were meaningful to Samira and her life experiences. We collected pictures using our phones, an Instax camera, and disposables. We hope that these images taken with different tools will add to the character and aesthetic of our final project.

In our walks with Samira, we experienced multiple juxtapositions in the imagery of the neighbourhood. Here, we see the rubble and destruction wrought by the ongoing redevelopment construction in the foregrounds of residential buildings.

This week, we also worked on understanding our timeline, the medium and focus of our project. We had given Samira a rough timeline to fill out and work on, and were extremely excited when Samira came to class with the entire timeline filled out! As the project heavily relies on Samira and her experiences, we were very pleased to see that, with her help, we could now move on to the following stages of developing our final piece.

To be inclusive, and also to make Samira feel more comfortable sharing her lived experiences with us, we hoped to perform the interview activity we did with Alexa Mills again. We saw this as an effective way to get to know each other and build more trusting relationships among our group members, as well as for us to further understand Samira’s perspectives and experiences of the revitalisation through the interview. Through the interview and the walking tours hosted by Samira, we were able to broaden our understanding of the revitalisation. At this time, we have started to ground our project photos and Samira’s stories into the timeline in a way that is inclusive of and specific to Samira’s personal story, but can be interacted with by other members of the community and others we hope to reach with our piece at the final showing.

This week, Samira seemed to be particularly comfortable around us during our class, which increased our confidence as well. It felt as though Samira is becoming accustomed to being around and working with us, and offered insight into the direction of our project and the way we should present certain aspects of it. It was really reassuring to see Samira so engaged in our discussions and our work, especially in the walking tour and photography. It is apparent that she has been actively thinking about this project in her day-to-day, which has been extremely helpful in being productive during our time together. The interview activity also showed her increase in confidence and her engagement with the project through her active participation, and her willingness to both answer and ask questions.

We’ve been having an extremely enlightening and fun experience working with Samira. Although she seemed slightly hesitant in our first few sessions. Having Samira alert, present, and confident this session was also reassuring for our group because it made getting into the work much easier for us, as well as much more productive. Knowing that she is also thinking about this project outside of our session times was doubly comforting, particularly when she told us that she had asked for her mother’s insights too.

Next week, we look forward to beginning the process of assembling and creating our final piece as a group. We hope to intertwine the stories we’ve heard from Samira, as well as external research done by Sayem, Erika and Lena, with the photographs we have taken of Regent Park to tell a meaningful story.

The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.

Social Fixers See Regent Park Through Samira

This session the Social Fixers aimed to finalise our project plan and explore different methods to employ in our project. In addition, we were looking forward to the tour of the neighbourhood Samira had planned for us. Despite the bitter cold that was waiting for us outside, we elected to continue with the tour as intended. Samira showed us around the neighbourhood, taking us to her former residence and enlightening us with her recollections of what Regent Park was like before the revitalisation. We got to learn about how aspects of her life have been altered due to her family’s displacement during the revitalisation process. For example, Samira noted how before the changes in Regent Park, she would often be able to go on walks with her grandmother and accompany her to the grocery store because she used to live in the building across the street from Samira and her parents. Although these walks and trips have continued now that Samira and her family have moved back into Regent Park, they have become more difficult. Samira and her grandmother are no longer afforded the convenience of proximity that they once had. In addition to changes in her personal life, Samira also enlightened us with context and the significance of different landmarks in the neighbourhood, and talked us through how the revitalisation has had effects in the larger community, as well.

Photo showing art installation in Regent Park displaying locals that have made meaningful contributions to the
community.

We were extremely grateful that we had the opportunity to go on the walk with Samira because it opened our eyes to the experiences of the community, and helped us understand what we hoped to do with our project. As a group we were having a particularly hard time understanding what direction to take the project in. However, as a result of Samira’s tour, we were provided with some perspective on who we hoped to reach with our timeline project, and how we aimed to get there. We decided to create a project that not only outlined Samira’s experiences of the revitalisation, but also highlighted the experiences of the community at large. As such, we elected to make our project an interactive one, where community members would be able to add their own experiences to our timeline, thereby bringing to light the multitudes of voices that are present in Regent Park, and that are affected everyday by the ongoing revitalisation. In addition, we want our project to be engaging for both newcomers to the neighbourhood, as well any other Toronto residents who may not necessarily have any connection to Regent Park. We hope that by highlighting residents’ experiences of displacement and social mixing, we can create a moment of enlightenment for those who may not fully understand the effects of Regent Park’s revitalisation.

Time lapse of our walk back to Regent Park Focus after our Regent Park tour with Samira.

While we have been very grateful to Samira for opening up to the group about her lived experiences and the stories about her childhood in Regent Park, there are also challenges that we have faced in the first two weeks working in our group. Coming into Regent Park and doing community work with locals is something that we feel very privileged to be able to do, as we are engaging with on-the-ground, first-hand knowledge that most students and professors at U of T are likely not able to experience. However, we have found it challenging at times to engage with Samira in a way that does not make her feel pressured to answer our questions or provide information to the team that she may not be comfortable with sharing. We appreciate and thank Samira for coming prepared to our last session, as she showed enthusiasm for the places she hoped to show us on her tour of the neighbourhood, but we also hope to strengthen our bond with her as the term wraps up so we can engage her in a meaningful way.

Our unique, intersectional identities allow us each to contribute to our project in different ways; however, as the members of our group each possess contrasting personalities, communicating with each other to achieve weekly goals has at times proven difficult. We’ve allowed ourselves to be curious about the possibility of clashing personalities to be the cause of some of the setbacks we have experienced as a group, so we hope to obtain some help from Aditi or Amna to facilitate productive group conversation, as well as come up with a plan that will allow us to stay on track with our project.

Production Plan & Timeline

March 4:

• Establish plan and finalize project methods

• Begin exploring project methods → go for a walk around the neighbourhood, take photos and videos

• Begin research and explore Samira’s relationship to different places in Regent Park

March 11:

• Finalize timeline

• Research: archival photographs, planning & government documents, policy brief, consultation meeting minutes, etc.

• Walk in Regent Park: take more photos on disposable camera

March 18:

• Compile all photographs, documents, notes, etc.

• Begin organizing research, assembling, and designing project

• Collaborate with Samira to write stories and make connection to lived experiences to the places on interest in Regent Park

March 25:

• Begin project assembly — continue working throughout the week on assembly outside of class time

• At this point, we will likely need help with design methods

April 1:

• Finalize project and send to printer

The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.

The Social Fixers

After having had some time to get together as a class to get to know the neighbourhood and each other as a group, the focus this week focus was much more on getting to know each of our team members, our collective interests, and how we would like to approach this project. Most importantly, this included our Diva Girl, Samira’s, hopes for what we will achieve together by the end of the term.

This session we aimed to: come up with a suitable name for our group, narrow down our mediums for our work, and also understand the kind of story Samira was interested in telling. We had a wonderful discussion with Samira about what displacement and social mixing meant for her, and discussed how we would use a timeline to tell Samira’s story in the midst of Regent Park’s redevelopment. Finally, we practiced the process of storytelling or challenging narratives with the help of popular culture elements or systems, such as memes.

After much deliberation, and what felt a lot like a futile effort, our group was able to come up with our name: the Social Fixers. Despite Sayem’s insistence on coming up with something superhero themed, we considered what would fit better with our topic of Displacement and Social Mixing. We thought “the Social Fixers” was a succinct play on words to the concept of ‘social mixing’, despite the fact that we do not intend to “fix” the issues stemming from social mixing. Through our project, we will attempt to highlight the narratives of those who have been traditionally been left out of conversations surrounding Regent Park’s redevelopment: its youth.

Since most of us have never had previous experience producing memes, when the time came to create one relating to our topic we were all pretty hesitant. It was a very difficult task — especially when you were put on the spot to get your creative juices flowing — but it proved itself deeply rewarding. In the workshop with Lawrence, we learned what stories are often told through memes, as well as how. More specifically, how to recognize a worthwhile story and create a counter-narrative that can be appealing to a specific audience.

The meme we came up with in class carried on the idea of ‘lost voices’ in the community among city planning staff, government officials and policymakers and their ongoing “revitalization” efforts. So, we found that naming ourselves “the Social Fixers” would be quite poignant in our attempt to highlight Samira’s voice amidst a process where she, her family, friends, and other peers, were not listened to but had much to say.

Thus far, for Erika, Sayem and Lena, the course has helped us humanize the knowledge that we have learned in different courses. It has also allowed us to expand the academic concepts and narratives on Regent Park pre- and post-revitalization from a young, female perspective that is not usually recognized in academia.

As for our project approach, we hope to take an arts-based approach, particularly focusing on photography and Photoshop. We will likely need help with Adobe Creative Cloud to design and edit our final pieces.

The topic that our final project will tackle is “displacement, moving and social mix.” Since these are complex processes where many different stakeholders are involved over a long period of time, we decided to create a timeline as a tool of collective memory that challenges the narratives constructed by outside actors about Regent Park. This will include stories and memories in written and graphic form from the Diva Girls with elements of time and place; as well as interesting or memorable events for the Regent Park community as a whole; stories portrayed in news outlets, documents from archives, maps, etc. During the process of gathering data and designing the timeline, we will post some of the content on an Instagram account parallel to our timeline. The desired outcome would be the creation of an interactive online timeline visually appealing that will hopefully encourage the Diva Girls, and others in Regent Park, to continue crafting their story of displacement and social mixing while being publicly available. Also, we hope to further viewers of our final project’s understanding of the role of media and design as tools of resistance and empowerment.

While we are very much looking forward to executing the process of art-making for our project with Samira, we hope to also embed the stories of other Diva Girls. If it is possible, we hope that at some point during the upcoming weeks we would be able to have a few minutes of time with some of the other Diva Girls, in order to include the stories of more than one person in our project. This may present a challenge, as every group will be busy working on their own projects.

The Social Fixers are Lena, Sayem, Erika, and Samira.