Framing Regent Park: the National Film Board of Canada and the construction of ‘outcast spaces’ in the inner city, 1953 and 1994

Abstract

In 1953 and 1994, the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada produced two documentary films about Toronto’s Regent Park, the country’s first and largest low-income housing project. Farewell to Oak Street charted the dramatic ‘before’ and ‘after’ effects of public housing on the family, social and cultural life of the innercity dwellers whose ‘slum housing’ was demolished in the 1940s and early 1950s to make way for the pioneering housing scheme. In 1994 the NFB made Return to Regent Park. This time round, the film centred on the abject failure of Toronto’s steamrolling urban renewal plans and the efforts of activists to combat drugs, crime and the physical/social stigma of the project. This article argues that both NFB portrayals of the project contributed to the powerful moral and territorial stigmatization of inner-city workers and public housing tenants in the city.

Socio-spatial stigmatization and the contested space of addiction treatment: Remapping strategies of opposition to the disorder of drugs

“…Louis Takahashi (1997) explores NIMBYism through the production of socio-spatial stigmatization, where representations of ‘spoiled identities’ and ‘tainted’/‘outcast’ spaces are woven together in discourses of socio-spatial infection, contagion and purification (Goffman, 1963; Purdy, 2005; Woolford, 2001). Focusing specifically on services for people who are homeless and people with HIV/AIDS (PWA), Takahashi (1997) suggests that non-productivity, dangerousness and personal culpability are three characteristics central to strategies of socio-spatial stigmatization.…”

Disability Consciousness on the Frontlines of Urban Struggle

“…Kern (:79) describes how the violence of gentrification is individualised and “materialized in and through bodies” so that “it does not seem to be socially and economically produced”. In the Canadian context, both Vancouver's and Toronto's downtown east ends are commonly referred to as “outcast spaces” (Purdy ) or “skid row” (Robertson ) where pathology is racialised and spatialised, and where most residents are dependent on disability benefits and local social services and health clinics to survive. Indeed, Robertson () argues that easy access to these medical and social services is a key motivator for people to move to Vancouver's Eastside.…”

“…Regent Park, in the DEE, has long been described as an “outcast space”, where racialised, social pariahs live (Purdy ). First intended to house industrial working classes, neoliberal restructuring and de‐industrialisation in the 1980s and 1990s meant that many industrial workers were laid off or their real wages decreased so much that they depended on food banks as much as welfare recipients.…”

The New Normal: The Figure of the Condo Owner inToronto'sRegentPark

“…Regent Park's heyday was short‐lived and the problems that have plagued it through the decades have been blamed on its design. Sean Purdy has written extensively (2003, ) about the ways in which Regent Park has been constructed through the decades as an “outcast space,” demonized and marked by a territorial stigma through persistent media depictions. Joseph Hall of the Toronto Star condemned Regent Park as “arguably the city's most notorious neighborhood … the shambling downtown housing complex has become synonymous in Toronto with social decay and failed urban planning” (December 20, 2002).…”

“…Studies of urban outcast spaces often highlight the role that race plays in the active stigmatization of these spaces (see, for example, Wacquant ). Regent Park is a racialized space, and this has been a contributing factor to its stigmatization over the years (Purdy ) . The official discourse of multiculturalism in Canada, however, means that race is often subsumed by other forms of difference, as the “cultural mosaic” asserts the existence of racial harmony and conceals practices of racism and racialization (see Teelucksingh ).…”