Tear Down the Regent

By Drew Halfnight

A "death wish" is the tendency of a person or thing to lean into its own destruction, and for some reason the expression came to mind while I rode my bike through Regent Park tonight.

I'm not referring to the people I saw. Most of them were kids, actually, lingering to play one last game in the unlit basketball court, or hanging out together on stoops and benches. I tried for a moment to peer into their futures and I saw the same thing I would in anyone's life: family, friends, love, struggle, gratitude, death.

No, I am referring to the colossal jagged towers in Regent South that stick out of the earth like extra-terrestrial shipwrecks, and the turdish three-storey buildings in Regent North that are hemmed in on all sides by pavement and garbage containers.

If those buildings could talk, I think they'd say "kill me now." Put me out of my misery. Find another way. Just shoot me.

But even if they're begging for the wrecking ball, it doesn't mean they'll get it any time soon. As former Toronto mayor and housing activist John Sewell said today, our public officers just do not have the money or the imagination to step out of the box on Regent Park. To think up something totally different.

Say what you want about the developers who built those monstrosities in the first place. At least they were trying something radical, something new, something with potential. It is their legacy that has brought us places like St. Lawrence, which seems to be functioning well enough.

Instead, the Regent Park redevelopers are building the same old Regent: ugly buildings in a contrived setting full of poor people, cut off from the rest of the city.

Whose bright idea was it to replace one ghetto with another, slightly smaller ghetto? I am deeply suspicious of the new plan. It will surely bring improvements, but it still looks unnatural, inroganic, a fortress of homes around a not-so-public park.

The city's approach to Regent reminds me of two books about architecture and society: Michel Foucault's awesome Discipline and Punish, which charts the development of the modern prison, and Prisons of Poverty by Loic Wacquant, a contemporary French sociologist, which is also about prisons, how they can be repositories for all the people society wishes to control or exploit. Both authors see centralized planning and architecture--which are supposed to be humanitarian tools wielded for the good of society's most vulnerable--as part of systems that often do the reverse: disempower and control, supervise and surveil, and repress.

I'm not sure if there isn't some of that reckless charity--intentionally or not--in our approach to Toronto's community housing. If everyone cares enough about providing cheap housing for the poorest people in this city, why don't we fork over the extra funds to have a healthy smattering of medium-sized houses and apartments available for the underprivileged spread out in every neighbourhood of the city?

And so with deep optimism, and a hint of communist utopia, I imagine that one day Regent Park will be removed. That its "death wish" will be fulfilled. That its concrete and bricks will be recycled one building at a time into new, beautiful homes for the poor built in every conceivable corner of Toronto.