The End

By Elizabeth Haggarty

Eleven weeks of Regent Park. When I first arrived it was the buildings, standing alone, that told the story. On a warm day in its central park overflowing rubbish replaced what should have been an overflow of people in a 7, 500 strong neighbourhood compacted between four city blocks. These grubby brick apartments were not just symbols of decay, but what planners said was wrong with Regent Park, their closed stairways and elongated corridors breeding crime and separating neighbours. Their construction shaped the people that lived within them, and subsequently were being torn down to reshape the community through its landscape.

In essence I went into Regent Park as a critic of architecture that destroyed a community. But, after six weeks I leave saddened by the potential loss of a community that architecture never managed to stifle.

Regent Park is a little like what I always imagined a North American high school to be. It has its cliques and groups and everyone has grown up with each other, everyone knows or at least knows of each other and the majority can’t wait to leave. In an area where 50 per cent of the population is under 18, it is probably not surprising that it reminded me of high school, that and the uniform brick buildings and pathways circling fields where sport was meant to be played but crisp bags lay scattered. A high school also attended by adults where posters of crossed out martini glasses reminded you not to drink by the baseball diamond or abandoned ice rink.

It took me awhile to notice that everyone I talked to in Regent Park was linked. Most of the kids at Focus Media, the second group I wrote about, had been part of Pathways to Education, the first group I covered. The graffiti on the wall in Point Blank’s video was done by the girl someone else in class was interviewing. Point Blank incidentally had undergone their media training at Focus. Many of the Faces of Regent Park were at the Regent Park Film Festival. Even George Smitherman kept on showing up at the events I went to.

Through community groups that reminded me of high school clubs, the community of Regent Park was revealed. And like the final years of high school what made them stand out was the possibility of change they embodied. Depressed and scared and desperate to leave, desperate to not be defined by those around you and the high school groups or neighbourhood stereotypes that you are meant to conform to individuals become exciting and amazingly empowered through their realization of their possibility to change. It happens when you leave high school and in Regent Park I realized it can happen to communities as well.

Perhaps Regent Park has not always been like this. Maybe with the possibility of change brought about by revitalization there is a newfound pride and sense of community. It’s not an overwhelming force, but obscured beneath daily challenges of money, and bureaucracy and finding a forum to be heard it is there. And while no one I have spoken to is saddened by the prospect of the loss of Regent Park and the marginalization and poverty it has come to symbolise, it will be sad if when displaced around Toronto the community’s hope for empowerment that was born, is buried in the ruins of hated bricks.