15th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
LIVING THROUGH “REVITALIZATION”: YOUTH,
LIMINALITY, AND THE LEGACY OF SLUM CLEARANCE
IN PRESENT-DAY REGENT PARK
RYAN K. JAMES
Department of Anthropology, York University, 2054 Vari Hall, 4700 Keele St, Toronto, ON
M3J 1P3
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
This paper traces experiences of local youth and their caregivers during the
“Regent Park revitalization”, a $1 billion endeavour to demolish Canada’s
oldest and largest social housing complex and replace it with a “mixed-income,
mixed-use community”. Based largely on participant-observation fieldwork
conducted while raising a small child in the area, this paper argues that the
material conditions of the neighbourhood during its estimated fifteen-year
period of transformation, and the ideological conflicts that surround the
concept of revitalization, have given rise to a complicated sociality in Regent
Park that forms an enduring, life-altering experience for youth and caregivers
that in many ways matters more than the eventual outcomes of the plan. This
sociality is crafted through residents’ day-to-day negotiations with a
hegemonic project aimed at securing their compliance with a high-stakes plan
to remake 69 acres of valuable land according to the tenets of third-way
urbanism, potentially reordering urban Canadian class identities in the process.
INTRODUCTION
Canada’s oldest and largest social housing complex is currently being
demolished and rebuilt as a “mixed-income, mixed-use community” (Toronto
Community Housing Corporation, 2012). Officially known as the “Regent Park
revitalization”, this $1 billion endeavour promised nearly everyone affected
what they apparently wanted to hear: tenants of disheveled 60-year-old social
housing will finally get new apartments; first-time homebuyers will get a
relatively affordable entry point into an ever-appreciating downtown
condominium market; arts organizations and retailers will flourish; and local
youth will get new recreational space and a renovated school. All units of social
housing will be replaced – though 29% of them outside the neighbourhood. As
the redevelopment period began in 2005 and is esimated to take a total of
fifteen years (Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2012), Regent Park at
the time of writing is a liminal patchwork of construction sites, old apartments
and townhouses in disrepair, and pristine new buildings containing either
condominiums or social housing units. Redevelopment is divided into five
phases, such that throughout the process, the majority of the neighbourhood
remains consistently populated as some residents move out and others move in.
Based largely on participant-observation fieldwork conducted while raising a
small child in non-profit housing at the perimeter of Regent Park, this paper
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traces some experiences of local youth and their caregivers1 during the current
stage of redevelopment. For these residents, the everyday realities of
revitalization in the midst of this transitional period are often more tangible
and relevant than any outcomes that may become apparent upon completion of
the project in 2020: the total timespan of at least fifteen years is longer than a
young person’s entire living memory, and more time than many caregivers hope
to live in social housing; while the four years or more it has taken for
households to relocate first to a temporary home, and then to a new Regent
Park unit, can span a transition from childhood to adolescence, or adolescence
to adulthood. For many, the year 2020 is effectively the far-flung future.
Further, the material conditions of the neighbourhood during its
transformation, and the ideological conflicts that surround the concept of
revitalization, have given rise to a complicated sociality in Regent Park that
forms an enduring, life-altering experience for residents that is unique to the
present state of flux. This paper focuses on this sociality, arguing that it is
crafted through residents’ day-to-day negotiations with a hegemonic project
aimed at securing their compliance with a high-stakes plan to remake 69 acres
of valuable land according to the tenets of “third-way urbanism” (see Keil,
2000), potentially reordering urban Canadian class identities in the process. The
lived effects of the hegemony of revitalization are especially acute for Regent
Park youth and their caregivers, who are often the primary targets of the
opportunities, disruptions, and discipline it brings.
FAREWELL TO OAK STREET
To ground an analysis of the revitalization and its implications for youth and
caregivers, a brief review of some local history is in order. Regent Park as it is
known today began as a “slum clearance” initiative, envisioned in 1946 to
replace a working-class district deemed outmoded and dangerous with a new
community planned by experts and replete with modern appliances (see Rose,
1958). Initially judged a success, a southward expansion of the project was
completed in 1959, but seen as problematic early on (see Haggart, 1964) and
judged a failed experiment in planning within a decade (see Allen, 1968).
Regent Park as a whole was soon subsumed within this label, intensifying a
classist “territorial stigmatization” (Purdy, 2003) afflicted on its tenants, who
by the late 1960s were doubly disadvantaged as low-income earners and now as
dwellers of an environment thought to foster anomie and criminality. By the
early 1970s, as postmodernist urbanism in the vein of Jane Jacobs was widely
espoused by the downtown liberal middle class, Regent Park was invoked as a
textbook case of the sort of failed modernist “cataclysmic redevelopment” that
older neighbourhoods must be protected against, while the blocks that the
vanguardist neighbourhood movements managed to “save” were soon gentrified
instead of being demolished (Caulfield, 1994; Ley, 1996). At present, Regent
Park is flanked at many points of its perimeter by blocks of expensive and
immaculately restored Victorian homes, and is thus all the more an anomaly as
a low-income enclave surrounded largely by wealth. Meanwhile, the population
1
This paper employs an open definition of the term “caregivers” to refer to all manner of
senior blood relatives and fictive kin (parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.), and to
account for a local tendency towards collectivized parenting in the form of neighbours
looking out for each others’ children.
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of Regent Park has since shifted from predominantly white and Anglophone in
its early days, to its profile at the beginning of the revitalization in which twothirds of residents were born outside of Canada and 70 languages are spoken
(Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2007, 5). Regent Park is one of the
most ethnoculturally diverse neighbourhoods in a city where “diversity” is
famously celebrated and commodified, and yet is also one of the poorest urban
localities in Canada.
Regent Park has always been an especially young community: at the beginning
of revitalization, over one-third of its residents were under 14, and just over
half were under 24 (Toronto Community Housing Corporation, 2007). A concern
for the welfare of youth has figured prominently in the planning and re-planning
of Regent Park through the decades. The redevelopment is in fact rooted in
smaller-scale initiatives led by tenants – many of them women with children – to
redevelop portions of Regent Park in the late 1980s and 1990s (Weyman, 1994;
personal communication). These campaigns were based largely on the
perception that the built environment of Regent Park facilitated the local sex
and drug trades, which were particularly active in these early days of crackcocaine and, by many accounts, predominantly engaged in by outsiders to the
danger and displeasure of residents (James, 2011). One by-product of this local
activism, in awkward combination with an excessive amount of outside
attention, has been the creation of some innovative social programming for
local youth. The Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre, for example, was
created in 1990 as an outlet for youthful creativity and a diversion from illicit
drugs and the like. Today it remains a popular and well-funded radio, video,
internet, and print media studio for Regent Park children and teenagers.
Pathways to Education, a free tutoring and support service for local high school
students founded in 2001, is widely credited for a decrease in the local dropout
rate from 56% to 10% (Pathways to Education, 2012; Toronto Star, 2008).
Despite these local success stories, by the time the process of revitalization
began in 2002, it was all but taken for granted that the built environment of
Regent Park facilitated the same social deviance it had once been designed to
discourage. It is thus being demolished for many of the same reasons it was
created (James, 2010). The revitalization is
purported to replace a
criminogenic built environment with one that emphasizes “eyes on the street”
through well-lit, glassy apartment buildings and row-houses that tightly hug
sidewalks (August, 2008, 86). On completion, roughly 71% of the 2,087 rentgeared-to-income (RGI) units that stood in Regent Park before the
redevelopment will be replaced on-site, sharing a redesigned streetscape of
small blocks and through streets with roughly 3,000 units of market housing
(condominiums and rentals) – Regent Park will then be 29% RGI housing, down
from 100% (Kipfer & Petrunia, 2009). Of the RGI units to be replaced off-site,
254 have already built in three hi-rise buildings, which also include low-end
market rent units.
The revitalization was conceptualized in the early 2000s, when local electoral
politics shifted from the right to the centre as a Liberal provincial government
and a labour-backed environmentalist mayor were elected. It has been argued
that in the years since, Toronto has been shaped by a dominant ideology of
third-way urbanism – a politically ambiguous blend of neoliberal economics with
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“select progressive strands” dominated by a “loose constellation of
predominantly white, new middle class gentrifiers, condominium dwellers, and
edgy hipsters” (Kipfer & Petrunia, 2009, 111)2. A move away from a
redistributive welfare state and “towards more self-reliance in the creation of
wealth” continues (Jackson, 2009, 402), but “the excesses of social
polarization” are tempered through government intervention and “metropolitan
plans … designed to be both competitive and socially inclusive” (Boudreau et
al., 2009, 402). In Regent Park, private capital finances “public” services funds raised from condominium sales are used to rebuild social housing in
Regent Park. A contemporary dance company which moved in across the street
in 2007 charges $25 for tickets to its productions, and offers free dance lessons
for local teenagers and pay-what-you-can yoga classes. Meanwhile, Richard
Florida’s “creative class” (2002) – “the young, cool, educated, high-value-added
worker of the knowledge economy” (Boudreau et al., 2009, 183) venerated as
the ideal urbanite in third-way thinking, is being recruited to the area through
projects such as a “Centre for Social Innovation” scheduled to open in late
2012, in which small organizations judged to be “working towards a better
world” (non-profit or for-profit) will share low-cost office space and resources.
A recent information session for prospective tenants was attended, among
others, by software developers, representatives of arts organizations, and a
broker who sells Regent Park condominiums.
Today, the full span of Regent Park’s history remains visible on Oak Street, an
east-west thoroughfare that was mostly converted into a 20-foot-wide sidewalk
when Regent Park was built, as celebrated at the time in the documentary
Farewell to Oak Street (National Film Board of Canada, 1956). The sidewalk still
bisects the northern portion of the neighbourhood. Locally known as “the
boardwalk”, it was identified as central to the social lives of local youth just as
the revitalization was beginning in 2005 (Laughlin & Johnson, 2011). My first
experience with the boardwalk came as an outsider in late 2009: before I lived
in the community, three young men challenged me to justify my presence on
the boardwalk as I passed by. I explained that I was on my way to volunteer at a
local school, and they wished me well. As an area resident, I now use the
boardwalk daily as a safe alternative to nearby arterial streets for walking
across three large downtown blocks with a small child. I have not since seen
anyone express the type of ownership over the space exhibited by the young
men who had checked me in 2009, however, and the point where this
interaction had occurred near Oak and Sackville Street is now a dusty, fencedoff expanse of temporary urban prairie, set to reopen as a park in autumn 2012.
The boardwalk, now largely desolate, will revert to being a through street at a
later phase in the revitalization - a fact that was celebrated in summer 2010 as
2
Enough voters in the 2010 mayoral election clearly did not identify with this downtown
hipster polity for the right-wing poplulist Rob Ford to win (see Filion, 2011). The new
mayor is freqently ridiculed by the liberal mainstream media, and the excesses of his
revanchist agenda have largely been stymied by city council. Given his highly tempered
impact, I would argue third-way urbanism remains a dominant ideology in Toronto. For
now, the Regent Park revitalization progresses as planned, despite a pending review of
condominium sales following accusations of conflicts of interest by a conservative tabloid
(see Maloney, 2012), and inflammatory comments from the budget chief who has “joked”
about cutting $16 million in revitalization funding, apparently only to irritate his rivals on
council’s centre-left (Dale, 2012).
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emblematic of the transition from bad to good planning during a “street party”
held by the housing authority and its private builder-developer partner. A local
band performed the jubilant “Dancin’ Down the Avenue,” featuring lyrics by the
developer’s vice-president celebrating how “we’ve learned a thing or two”
about planning since the 1940s3.
Figure 1 – The four corners of Oak and Sackville Streets. In the foreground, the Oak Street
“boardwalk”, which will become a through street when the revitalization is complete; to its left, the
vacant space that will soon become “the big park”; and to its right, an empty expanse of grass that
surrounds an original apartment building, as is typical of the old Regent Park. In the midground to the
left stands a condominium building and a rental building just visible behind it; both were recently
constructed through the revitalization. An original apartment building is in the midground to the
right. (Photo by author)
LIMINALITY AND “COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT”
To date, “revitalization” has reconfigured roughly one-third of Regent Park.
The remainder, at first glance, looks much as it would have in 1960: apartment
buildings and townhouse clusters, pedestrian-only walkways, and dead-end side
streets feeding into parking lots. Yet even this unrevitalized portion includes
important additions made over the years: an outdoor swimming pool, two ice
rinks, two commmunity centres, antiviolence murals (figure 2), playgrounds,
garden plots (both sanctioned and unsanctioned by the housing authority), and
CPTED4 interventions of the past such as rusty wrought-iron fencing and security
cameras. These modifications of the built environment were envisioned by
3
4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf3xrciggQg.
Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design.
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generations of tenants, largely in the interest of keeping their children safe,
healthy, and occupied, and were crafted through their decades of empassioned
engagement with social service agencies, and the politicians and bureaucracies
that have governed the project with a range of sympathy, hostility, and
indifference (James, 2011; Purdy, 2003). Though the community has always
been dynamic, the dominant discourse surrounding it tends to imagine Regent
Park as finally undergoing its first change-for-the-better, as it briefly passes
between two diametrically opposed states: from a poorly planned, depressing
enclave of poverty; to a normalized, “mixed” neighbourhood that will
seamlessly blend with its surroundings. This flattens the complexity of nearly
six decades of history, predicts the future with an unreasonable degree of
certainty, and glosses over the current transitory period of at least fifteen
years.
Figure 2 – one of several murals painted on an original Regent Park building. (Photo by author)
My emphasis on the importance of this transitional period and its effects is
informed by a distant but relevant area of the anthropological canon – Victor
Turner’s cross-cultural studies of rituals that mark a shift from one state to
another for groups and individuals. Turner noted that these “betwixt and
between” moments have a unique potential to give rise to a “mystical
solidarity” between people of different social rankings (1987, 18) as “jurally
sanctioned relationships” matter less when everything is in flux (1987, 11). This
brings to mind the idealized views of the revitalization presented in official
plans and press releases, which imagine socioeconomic class rendered invisible
as subsidized housing and $500,000 condominums are designed to appear
mutually indistinguishable, and where new neighbours of all ages, ethnicities,
and income levels help plan their neighbourhood together at “participatory”
sessions open to all. Indeed, tenants and condominium owners now live across
the street from one another, and a “task force” has been created to build
“community unity” among them through events such as “town hall” meetings.
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Outside of such special events, however, socializing appears non-existent in
some places, lively in others, and awkwardly fragmented in most. Turner’s
observations of hierarchies being muddied and forgotten may only speak to the
as-yet unattained ideals of the revitalization, but his emphasis on liminal states
as imbued with unique and influential characteristics unto themselves provides
a useful point of departure for an analysis of how the current, tangible reality
of a locality can matter more than the presumed outcomes of a long-term plan.
Despite goals of social mixity, stories from some of my participants illustrate
enduring divisions along the lines of race and class. I once asked a group of
current, former, and temporarily relocated tenants of Regent Park’s social
housing, aged 16 to 26, if they knew anyone from the condominiums. All said
no; one man seemed suprised I had asked. One woman’s response was a story
of receiving stares from people entering a condominium building as she
congregated with her friends (social housing tenants) on the sidewalk nearby.
“They were kind of looking at us, like, ‘why are all these black people hanging
out here? I’m trying to get into my building; this is supposed to be a high-class
condo’”, she said, imagining the thoughts underlying a gaze she interpreted as
elitist racism. Behaviour that is simply using public space to some, is loitering
to others. Her story brought to mind a prediction made by a lifelong resident in
another interview, that the presence of new, middle class residents would
disrupt longstanding, unspoken codes around everyday life in shared space.
Usage of radios and barbecues, for example, would come to be governed by bylaws and complaints procedures, rather than the informal standards shared by
longtime social housing tenants that balance rule-bending permissiveness with
mutual consideration.
It is important to note, however, that the moments described above take place
during a particularly challenging point in the transition at which there is little
for people to do together. A new community centre, an indoor swimming pool,
an “Arts and Cultural Centre”, and “the big park” are all slated to open within
a year. Much has been made of the potential of these amenities to bring people
together, particularly the park at Sackville and Oak Streets: one senior TCHC
official explained to me that the spatial arrangement of condominiums, rentgeared-to-income units, and the park will “create opportunities for people to
cross paths” as residents of the two types of housing will take the same path to
the off-leash dog run. Even before the park opens, there is some anecdotal
confirmation of the hopes that hinge on it: a recent master’s thesis on the
revitalization (Greaves, 2011) describes an instance of dog-inspired socializing
among people from different socioeconomic classes. A personal experience near
an extant off-leash dog zone at the perimeter of Regent Park has inspired a
note of cynicism on this point, however: one morning I witnessed a woman in
expensive clothes arguing with two city workers who prevented her dog from
using the children’s wading pool. She felt that because my daughter was the
only child using it and there were many dogs in the park, the pool “should be
for the dogs”.
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Figure 3 – looking south through a construction fence on “the boardwalk”. In the foreground, the
fenced-off space that will become “the big park”; in the background to the left, two original Regent
Park buildings with a crane and the beginnings of a condominium building in front of them; in the
middle background, the Regent Park Arts and Cultural Centre, in the late stages of construction; and
in the background to the right, the “Paintbox” condominium tower, also near completion, with a
Macedono-Bulgarian Church in front of it. (Photo by author)
Elsewhere, the liminal state of the neighbourhood provides for scenes that
border on idyllic, such as drinking fresh coconut water and sitting on an old
weightlifting bench outside Regent Park’s “farmer’s market” (figure 3) – a semipermanent wood-and-sheet-plastic structure that sells discounted produce and
is often surrounded by children playing cricket. Though I have been assured by a
the local city councilor’s office that the market will have a place postrevitalization (this has been corroborated by the market owner himself), I
suspect the experience (and the prices) may not be the same if the market is
formalized, to some extent, in moving to a permanent structure. For another
snapshot, at a small park located across the street from the last portion of
Regent Park to be redeveloped, roughly a dozen adults often sit in the shade as
our children and grandchildren play together nearby. The group includes
graduate students and factory workers, young parents and seniors, and at least
four languages are spoken. Before children are turned loose to play, adults scan
the playground for broken glass, syringes, and other dangerous debris that
rarely appears. Each adult keeps an eye on each child; one takes his 200-pound
dog for a walk to discourage the presence of those suspected of using the park
for illegitimate purposes. The social life of the park thus exhibits precisely the
sort of “mixed” social life and “eyes on the street” that revitalization promises,
despite being located in a part of the community that will not be revitalized for
several years.
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Figure 4 – The “farmers’ market” in Regent Park, with original apartment buildings in the
background. (Photo by author)
“THE GENERAL DIRECTION IMPOSED ON SOCIAL LIFE”
To contextualize my field observations, I turn to Anthony Leeds’s formulation of
the role of political and economic phenomena in the everyday lives of
citydwellers: a unique “urban ambience” or “cityness” is crafted through
symbiotic interactions between the locality and the “supralocal power
structures” that manifest in and around it (1994, 221). In the case of Regent
Park, these power structures would include an entrepreneurial public housing
authority (Hackworth & Moriah, 2006); the Daniels Corporation, its private
builder-developer partner; the centrist municipal government that presided
over the design of the new neighbourhood; the various public and private
funders of local social service agencies; and the local media, which has
endorsed the revitalization at nearly every turn 5. These powerful bodies “touch
down” in Regent Park in the form of the revitalization, a project crafted
through interactions with each other and with the residents of the urban
locality it is fundamentally transforming.
To think through the nuances of these interactions, it is useful to turn to
Antonio Gramsci’s insights on how the success of a political project depends on
the consent of at least some of “the masses”. The concept of “hegemony” – the
5
A major exception is a recent series of articles in the right-wing tabloid, The Toronto
Sun, which level conflict-of-interest accusations at former TCHC executives, the Daniels
Corporation president, and the centrist city councilor who represents Regent Park for
buying condominiums there (see Levy, 2012 & 2012a). Much of the content of these
accusations rests on innuendo drawn from, interestingly, a crude co-optation of some
leftist and academic critiques of revitalization as gentrification. Though these articles
have been influential enough to prompt the Toronto Community Housing Corporation to
launch a review, the vast majority of newspaper coverage over the past decade has been
favourable to the revitalization and the politicians and developers behind it.
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incomplete process by which subaltern groups consent to the “general direction
imposed on social life” by elites (2003:12) – illuminates how neoliberal
governmental priorities and the interests of private capital have influenced the
“participatory” re-planning of Regent Park, and the forms of community
organizing that now take place there. As the revitalization stems from earlier
attempts led by residents to have parts of the community rebuilt, and has
involved public consultations at every stage, it is often prided on being a
“participatory” effort. The incompleteness of hegemony is key – while some
social housing tenants are heavily invested in the revitalization, others decry
the concept as a cynical euphemism for gentrification. Others still express proand anti-revitalization sentiments in the same breath, and/or find themselves
roped into the work of revitalization despite their misgivings around it. Through
the lens of young peoples’ and parents’ perspectives, and experiences at
community events sanctioned by the housing authority and its private partner,
this section examines revitalization as a hegemonic project that seeks to
subsume community activity and reconfigure urban class identities along the
lines of “mixity” – while leaving income disparity untouched and privatizing
some social services formerly provided by the state, as is the third way.
As a researcher and low-income resident of the area6, I am often in an awkward
relationship with a process I am critical of. Seeking to “give back to the
community” in some sense, I have volunteered at “Focus” (the aforementioned
Regent Park Focus Youth Media Arts Centre). I once arranged for two TCHC
officials to be interviewed on-air by youth, and though the exercise certainly fit
Focus’s mandate of facilitating skills development for its young participants,
our discussion rarely strayed from the celebratory discourse of press releases
and condominium advertisements. I had hoped for a more frank and grounded
discussion than the one we had, and left feeling like I had volunteered to broker
a controversial project to youths who may have had unspoken misgivings about
it. At Focus’s monthly free concerts held in the Daniels Corporation’s
condominium sales office, I can often be found helping friends stack the
corporation’s tables and chairs at the end of the night as a volunteer roadie.
And while Focus staff are grateful for the free usage of the venue, the events
do have a different “feel” from the concerts that occured in Focus’s old
headquarters in the unkempt basement of a now-demolished apartment
building.
At other times I have been enlisted into the manual labour of revitalization. A
friend at a local social service agency once recruited me as a volunteer to help
move the “peace garden” – a memorial to Regent Park youth killed by violence,
found in 2005 by grieving local women. In October 2011, the garden had to be
uprooted to make way for construction; the salvaged trees and shrubs were
stored over the winter for replanting this year. The event was solemn and
profound, centering on a speech by a founder of the garden. After about 50
school-age children had helped with the gardening and returned to class, I was
one of the last remaining adults, covered in mud and wrestling small trees out
of the ground with Lancefield Morgan, then TCHC’s “revitalization consultant” –
a full-time liaison between tenants and the landlord, whose work oscillated
6
As a Canadian-born PhD candidate, I am, of course, among the most privileged lowincome earners in the neighbourhood.
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between public relations and liberal community organizing. Lancefield
continued digging in the pouring rain after I had to leave for work.
Other community events have received funding from the purveyors of
revitalization, but taken a decidedly anti-revitalization tack. At the 2009 annual
Regent Park Film Festival, a free four-day event which included the Daniels
Corporation among its many sponsors, I moderated a panel discussion on the
revitalization following a cluster of film screenings around the theme of
“displacement”. A panelist and lifelong resident said the new neighbourhood
“will not be a community” as memories, longstanding multicultural
relationships, and a sense of place and groundedness (especially for youth), are
all being lost. He noted that pre-revitalization, high-achieving youth from
Regent Park – such as the organizer of the film festival itself - would stay
connected to the community, acting as role models and voices for its other
youth. The disruptions caused by relocation now mitigate against the cohesion
and continuity this connectedness once provided.
These observations came to mind two years later, when I
interview by asking participants if they have already moved
redevelopment. One temporarily relocated teenager responded
got the revitalization attack, I would call it.” I asked why
“attack” and she replied
began a group
as part of the
glibly, “yes, we
she calls it an
Um, in a lot of ways it destroys a lot; like it takes a lot from you. Possibly
physically because you’re not in the same space; mentally you lose a
community, in other words like you don’t feel that connectedness as you do
while you're in Regent Park when you go out to [her new location]. Because I
don’t even know my neighbours’ names, where before I knew the whole family
next door to me, and so forth, right down the line. It’s not the same.
Though now living more than a reasonable walking distance away from Regent
Park, she still frequented the same community centres in the area as this is
“the best way for me to stay in contact with the environment that I know.” For
another participant, merely moving from one part of Regent Park to another
disrupted the childhood social networks that were specific to his nowdemolished building.
Some members of the focus group vaguely remembered taking part in the
consultations designed to elicit young peoples’ input on plans for a new
community centre (its construction has just begun). One noted they have no
way of knowing what has happened to the data they provided as no one kept in
touch with them – “unless their idea of keeping in touch is the presentation
centre across the street on Dundas” (the condominium sales office). When I
asked participants if they expected to be connected to Regent Park in five or
ten years, another ex-resident who remains involved in the community replied
I don’t know if it’s gonna be the same in five years … like, do I wanna work
with – sorry,7 but – snobby white people? No. Not to say those are the only kind
of people that are going to be involved here, but if it’s like all these expensive
7
I am white.
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condos that the people I grew up with can’t afford, I’m not probably going to
be involved.
These perspectives, in which the “old” Regent Park is longed for and
condominium owners are seen as a “snobby” Other – sharply contradict the
hegemonic discourse around revitalization in which “old” and “new” residents
are the euphemistic terms for “social housing tenants” and “condominum
owners” respectively, and meetings are held for the express purpose of
fostering “social connectivity” and “community unity” across this old/new
divide.
Many of my participants speak wistfully of things from the past that the
revitalization hegemony portrays as obsolete and/or dangerous: the old
buildings, the car-free sidewalk, identities rooted in socioeconomic class. This
brings to mind Kathleen Stewart’s work on nostalgia as a reconstructive
process, through which people who have experienced a loss of community make
sense of shifting relations (1988). On this note, a local youth worker one said
that despite the benefits of her agency moving into new space, in the end “it’s
another change, and kids just want things to stay the same”. At present, the
ideologies of third way urbanism that underpin revitalization constitute an
incomplete hegemony in Regent Park: the community is being redeveloped
according to third-way principals, but in this current moment of transition,
many residents – young ones, especially – have not embraced the new classless
urban identity that is valorized as the ideal way to belong to a “mixed”
community.
CONCLUSION AND AFTERWORD
In the time between draft submissions of this paper, several violent incidents in
the neighbourhood involving youth have caused concern, particularly from local
parents, social workers, and housing authority officials. As no one has been
killed, the incidents have largely evaded media coverage, but some community
members fear that the violence will escalate. I have heard it blamed on a
current death of recreational space for youth, and on a lack of stability in the
local illicit trades as much of their leadership has been imprisoned and/or
moved out in recent years. As standard procedure, the housing authority
pursues evictions against the families of youth involved in serious crime and
violence. At the time of writing, I am in the process of researching this issue
further; for now, it would appear that though youth crime and violence are
facts of life in any community, their rates in Regent Park have increased in
recent months, and are taking on a character specific to the conditions of a
neighbourhood in a prolonged state of transition. Still, local social workers
adamantly caution against any anti-youth moral panic or law-and-order
crackdown, as those involved make up a miniscule percentage of the young
population of Regent Park.
This paper has aimed to illustrate the hegemonic character of the notion of
“revitalization”, through an analysis of its political-economic context and its
lived effects for local residents during its implementation. It has done so
through a focus on the experiences of young people and their caregivers, as
these residents arguably experience the transition from social housing project
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15th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE
to “mixed community” most intensely. Though critical of the current
redevelopmment, this paper is not intended as an argument that the prerevitalization status quo of Regent Park was adequate – on the contrary, I will
conclude by cosigning the position of a lifelong resident and mother: “No one
should ever have to see what some kids saw here,” she told me, referring to the
disrepair and instability of the 1980s and 1990s. “And people should be able to
go to an ATM8, buy good food – everyone deserves that. But why are we only
getting that now that people own homes here?” This participant was also angry
that the new retail space - a discount grocery store, a coffee shop, a pharmacy,
and a telecommucations provider - is thus far completely occupied by corporate
chains, while the financial opportunities afforded to residents by revitalization
have largely been limited to low-wage, blue-collar, and/or front-line social
service positions. “Nobody from Regent Park made any real money, while so
many people made tonnes of money off the redevelopment,” she said angrily.
In a different conversation, a resident supportive of the revitalization noted
that though many of the jobs created are part-time and low-paying, such is the
case for the Toronto job market in general, and so Regent Park is “like any
other neighbourhood” in this regard. It appears that Regent Park is blending in
with its surroundings.
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Automatic Teller Machine. Much had been made of the fact that Regent Park never had
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