From ‘slum clearance’ to ‘revitalisation’: planning, expertise and moral regulation in Toronto’s Regent Park

Abstract

This paper addresses the planning and re‐planning of Regent Park, Canada’s first large‐scale public housing development. Located just outside the commercial and tourist core of Toronto, Regent Park was planned and built in the 1940s and 1950s through a ‘slum clearance’ initiative aimed at safeguarding the morality of its residents. Though it was widely celebrated at first, the project – like many similar developments across North America – was soon deemed a complete failure, and its image as a dilapidated and criminogenic anachronism has intensified over the past six decades. In 2002, the City of Toronto established a ‘participatory planning’ process to elicit the input of Regent Park residents in a plan to radically transform the neighbourhood – the result is a five‐step ‘revitalisation’ effort through which Regent Park is being bulldozed and replaced with a mixed‐use, mixed income community of public housing, market housing, retail space and amenities. The revitalisation plan is touted as a just, democratic and inclusionary solution to the many problems of Regent Park; this paper critically evaluates these claims by putting them in historical context. By comparing the thinking behind the original planning of Regent Park and the thinking behind the current attempt to ‘revitalise’ it, I aim to illustrate how the revitalisation is guided, to a significant extent, by a concern with the moral regulation of poor and working‐class city‐dwellers (particularly those who are new Canadians and/or racialised minorities) by altering the built environment in which they live. I aim to illustrate how this concern has been modified and reconfigured from the 1940s to the present alongside the transition to a neoliberal economy in Canada, and through the partial incorporation of postmodernist urbanism within official planning policy.