By Drew Halfnight
What can I say? Reporting in Regent Park is not easy.
Reporting on relocation in Regent Park is especially tough.
All of the usual "gatekeepers," the people who would liaise and facilitate and connect, are somewhat reticent about outsiders.
And so are many residents, for that matter.
It's understandable, since presumably since the neighbourhood was built it has been assailed by sociologists, urban planners, reporters, researchers and students who come to study and learn about Regent Park but don't wind up giving anything back.
And if Regent Park has been stigmatized and fetishized in turn by people probably no dumber or less polite than me, why should I expect a warm welcome and a lot of help in my reporting?
Hitting the streets to meet new people and get comment is rough going.
There's the language barrier, the cold, the fact that I am a tall male and that I carry clunky recording and photography equipment: a whole series of problems comes into play.
On top of everything, I am asking about people's experience with something intensely personal, namely the demolition of their homes and the forced displacement of their families.
Why would anyone want to talk openly about this with a stranger?
But forget all of the above for a moment. Much of the problems and challenges I mention would exist anywhere. There's something else at play in Regent Park specifically.
Most reporting is done on a single entity: a person, a team, a company, a department in government, anything that is momentarily affected by conflict. And for a time the media descends on that entity, and makes it into an object. It is "reduced" to headlines, photos, or the few phrases of comment that are clean enough to be quoted.
And those affected play along, sometimes grudgingly, because they know that eventually the objectification will pass and they can go back to near-total privacy again.
Maybe Regent Park is different. Maybe it is perpetually mistaken for this sort of entity: an object mired in conflict to be studied, read about, exposed and understood.
Maybe the very idea and nature of large-scale housing projects is objectifying.
Really of course Regent Park is just a community, same as any other, where people are trying to live their lives in peace. But perhaps to be part of that community is also to be one of 10,000 subjects in an experiment launched a half-century ago by activists and urban planners.
To report on individuals experiencing relocation is one thing, but to do it in Regent Park is to report on people who are inherently objectified.
They are part of the Regent Park experiment, and they know it.
At first I was surprised by the sheer number of people I approached for comment, direction or help who were not at all disposed to simple chit-chat.
But now I think I see better why they might be sick of the attention.
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