I keep getting in arguments about Regent Park that it's some sort of Jane Jacobs'-esque revitalization of the neighbourhood that is necessary because the buildings were falling apart. You know, as opposed to a forced relocation of as many poor people as possible out of some prime real estate, which is how I've seen it since the beginning.
Originally Regent Park had 2187 social housing units. The revitalization plan was to replace all of then, and then add another 3000 privatized housing built with city money.
Developers could not agree even to this plan because they didn't think it went far enough in re-engineering the social make-up and "diluting the poverty" and so the original condition of replacing all public housing units was dissolved to the effect of 600* original units - constituting some 2000 people - being permanently displaced and dispersed, most likely to the peripheries.
*Source: City of Toronto, “By-Law No. 140-2005 to Adopt Amendment to the Official Plan for the Former City of Toronto with Respect to the Regent Park Area” (Toronto, 16 February 2005)
I haven't had time to cross reference this source, but I got it from this excellent paper: "Recolonization" Public Housing: A Toronto Case Study" ---- Those two concepts you mentioned aren't incompatible. It is precisely forced relocation legitimized by Jacob-esque
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Haha, no apologies. I needed hard statistics like this.
The thing is, I think Jacobs' theories in terms of what makes a neighbourhood functional are true. Thing is, Regent Park, unlike other housing developments, was functional. Not in terms of mixed income, but in terms of mixed use-it has decent transit, community hubs, and necessities in walking distance. Community leaders were doing their damnedest to mitigate the problems brought about by poverty. The main problem was the crumbling infrastructure, which could have been fixed without needing to build privatized housing there.
But that wouldn't have been profitable, so all of a sudden they started picking and choosing from urban planning theory, deciding that the problem was the lack of economic and social mixing. Which is only one thing that Jacobs wrote about, and not at all the issue with Regent Park.
More of the same is sure to follow at Lawrence Heights, even with BASICS there doing their thing.
There's already huge opposition from the surrounding wealthy neighbourhood groups against densification, and with the Ford regime in place, it's be a skip and hop to play with the social housing vs private housing numbers to placate the developers and racist rich people around Lawrence Heights.
What most disgusting about this to me is how viscerally these renewal plans use New Urbanism design forms and a "sustainable development" gloss to the service of pathologizing and dehumanizing people. The conditions are exactly the same as those that cleared the slums Regent Park was originally designed to replace in the 1950s. Except, rather than the material benefit of having created more public housing borne out of the cruelest of ideas, we are ripping them away.
Comments 7
I keep getting in arguments about Regent Park that it's some sort of Jane Jacobs'-esque revitalization of the neighbourhood that is necessary because the buildings were falling apart. You know, as opposed to a forced relocation of as many poor people as possible out of some prime real estate, which is how I've seen it since the beginning.
Reply
Originally Regent Park had 2187 social housing units. The revitalization plan was to replace all of then, and then add another 3000 privatized housing built with city money.
Developers could not agree even to this plan because they didn't think it went far enough in re-engineering the social make-up and "diluting the poverty" and so the original condition of replacing all public housing units was dissolved to the effect of 600* original units - constituting some 2000 people - being permanently displaced and dispersed, most likely to the peripheries.
*Source: City of Toronto, “By-Law No. 140-2005 to Adopt Amendment to the Official Plan for the Former City of Toronto with Respect to the Regent Park Area” (Toronto, 16 February 2005)
I haven't had time to cross reference this source, but I got it from this excellent paper: "Recolonization" Public Housing: A Toronto Case Study"
----
Those two concepts you mentioned aren't incompatible. It is precisely forced relocation legitimized by Jacob-esque ( ... )
Reply
The thing is, I think Jacobs' theories in terms of what makes a neighbourhood functional are true. Thing is, Regent Park, unlike other housing developments, was functional. Not in terms of mixed income, but in terms of mixed use-it has decent transit, community hubs, and necessities in walking distance. Community leaders were doing their damnedest to mitigate the problems brought about by poverty. The main problem was the crumbling infrastructure, which could have been fixed without needing to build privatized housing there.
But that wouldn't have been profitable, so all of a sudden they started picking and choosing from urban planning theory, deciding that the problem was the lack of economic and social mixing. Which is only one thing that Jacobs wrote about, and not at all the issue with Regent Park.
Reply
There's already huge opposition from the surrounding wealthy neighbourhood groups against densification, and with the Ford regime in place, it's be a skip and hop to play with the social housing vs private housing numbers to placate the developers and racist rich people around Lawrence Heights.
What most disgusting about this to me is how viscerally these renewal plans use New Urbanism design forms and a "sustainable development" gloss to the service of pathologizing and dehumanizing people. The conditions are exactly the same as those that cleared the slums Regent Park was originally designed to replace in the 1950s. Except, rather than the material benefit of having created more public housing borne out of the cruelest of ideas, we are ripping them away.
aaaargh I am so angry.
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