Challenging the Rhetoric of Stigmatization: The Benefits of Concentrated Poverty in Toronto's Regent Park

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impacts of territorial stigmatization on the experiences and life strategies o f residents of Regent Park, Canada's first and largest public housing estate. It centers on how discourses o f isolation, disorganization, and danger (based on imported theories and depictions o f life in social housing developed in a very different time and place than the Canadian inner city) have served to justify the state-driven gentrification o f public housing via 'socially mixed' redevelopment. Drawing on semistructured, in-depth interviews with over thirty tenants, this paper offers a counternarrative documenting the many benefits and advantages o f living in an area o f 'concentrated poverty'. It reveals that tenants have deep attachments to Regent Park despite its reputation, and enjoy a strong sense o f community; they have access to dense networks o f friendship and support, localamenities and convenience, and services and agencies that suit their needs. While these benefits are real, they are counteracted by the impacts o f coping with a neglected physical environment resulting from welfare state retrenchment (particularly on the housing front); and coping with safety issues and drug-related activities. Socially mixed redevelopment holds questionable promise for meaningfully addressing these problems and may even diminish some o f the benefits o f community life.

Planetary Rent Gaps

“…The negative manner in which certain parts of cities are portrayed (by journalists, politicians and think tanks especially) has become critically important to debates about their future. A mushrooming body of work points to a direct relationship between the defamation of place and the process of gentrification (August 2014;Gray and Mooney 2011;Kallin and Slater 2014;Slater and Anderson 2012;Thörn and Holgersson 2014;Wacquant 2007), where neighbourhood "taint" becomes a target and rationale for "fixing" an area via its reincorporation into the real estate circuit of the city-yet sometimes the "perception" Hammel outlines is so negative and entrenched that it acts as a symbolic barrier or diversion to the circulation of capital. In sum, as territorial stigmatisation intensifies, there are major implications for rent gap theory, but further investigations are needed to understand how the theory might be recalibrated to account for the pressing issue of the symbolic defamation of space.…”

Re‐scripting Place: Managing Social Class Stigma in a Former Steel‐Making Region

“…A striking example of the challenge to stigmatisation is further found in research in Toronto's Regent Park, Canada's first and largest public housing estate. In the process of being demolished to make way for a mixed‐use, mixed‐income community, August (:1317) discovered a compelling “counternarrative” ( sic ) was in place where, paradoxically, residents pointed to the benefits of living in an area of “concentrated poverty”. While recognising social problems, “most people liked their homes; describing a convenient, service‐rich, well‐located neighbourhood with a strong sense of community and abundance of friendship and supportive social ties” (August :1318).…”

“…In the process of being demolished to make way for a mixed‐use, mixed‐income community, August (:1317) discovered a compelling “counternarrative” ( sic ) was in place where, paradoxically, residents pointed to the benefits of living in an area of “concentrated poverty”. While recognising social problems, “most people liked their homes; describing a convenient, service‐rich, well‐located neighbourhood with a strong sense of community and abundance of friendship and supportive social ties” (August :1318). The lively downtown district was favourably compared with Toronto's bland suburbs with residents placing a strong emphasis on social networks and belonging in the community; a theme found in other urban accounts of stigmatised neighbourhoods, where what is a vilified place to many “outsiders”, is home to those that are “insiders” (Cahill ; Keith ; Kirkness ; McKenzie ; Reay and Lucey ).…”

Navigating identity, territorial stigma, and HIV care services in Vancouver, Canada: A qualitative study

“…This body of literature has provided an understanding of the exclusionary function of stigma associated with space, and the impacts this has on individuals’ negotiation of place and identity. Although the concept of territorial stigma has only begun to be applied in health research, it has been employed in studies focusing on housing inequities and community development (August, 2014; Garbin & Millington, 2012; Kallin & Slater, 2014). Here, it has been associated with state-sponsored gentrification (Kallin & Slater, 2014), particularly around mixed public housing.…”