Don't Fence Me In

By: Martha Jack

On a Regent Park Wednesday night, things are going to the dogs. Families, couples and singles just home from work are out in full force taking Fido for an evening stroll. While neither the dogs nor their owners are likely thinking about the future of their much-maligned neighourhood, the signs are all around them of where Regent Park is headed in the future.

There are many things that separate Regent Park from other communities in Toronto – the poverty, the violence, the “wrong side of the tracks” mentality – but I would like to make the case for another, less obvious, difference. While at first it might seem meaningless, the mere trivial observation of an outsider, the thing that separates Regent Park from other Toronto communities is fences.

Fences, you could say, do not a distinct community make. But the sheer number of them in Regent Park – separating houses from the street and neighbours from each other – is something to think about. It closes off the community both to the outside and to each other. I don’t know if they are keeping people in or out, but fences between neighbours and bars on windows do not make for an opening and inviting community.

On nearly every corner and side street in Regent Park there are community services catering to different segments of the population, the homeless, children, cultural groups and families. It’s great to see that the resources are there to help the community, but there’s only so much that community services can offer to a neighbourhood. To really revitalize the community, people need to come together. They need to sit on front porches and meet on the street and discuss what they need and where they’re going to get it.

Besides the literal wood and wrought-iron fences, there are the figurative fences limiting contact and communication between different segments of the Regent Park population. In a neighbourhood that has yuppies in Shuter Street brownstones who take their dogs to get “pawdicures” at Top Hat and Tails on Carlton Street, and homeless men who call the Seaton House Men’s Hostel home, getting all the groups to dialogue is a difficult task.

There are many ideas of what the Regent Park of the future might look like and what it’ll take to get there. Let’s start by tearing down some fences.