Abstract
Regent Park was built with great optimism in the 1950s as a public housing neighbourhood in Toronto. Over the years, however, it has come to be seen as a failure of this ideal and stigmatized as a poor, crime-ridden, violent neighbourhood with large numbers of visible minorities and immigrants. Recent urban revitalization efforts have aimed to transform the physical space as well as to re-brand the neighbourhood in more positive ways as part of a diverse, multicultural city. This paper critically considers the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a place, between the external representations of the city’s urban developers and the internal, “lived experiences” of its Muslim residents. It analyses the construction of meaning of Regent Park as a Muslim place within the representation of Toronto as a Canadian, multicultural city.
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Notes
I use the term “immigrants” here because it is a category used in census statistics. However, I critique the implication of the term, which is often used to draw a false dichotomy between white colonial settlers, who are considered “Canadian” and “immigrants,” who are (permanently) from somewhere else.
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