Abstract
This article examines the uses of “diversity” in the revitalization of two public housing projects in Toronto, Canada: Regent Park and Lawrence Heights. Both revitalization plans emphasize a diversity of use, diversity of income, and diversity of culture. I argue the diversity of diversity serves as a legitimizing tool for the revitalization projects and that the use of the term is productively ambiguous and draws from the cachet of Canadian multiculturalism, without explicitly naming race and racial inequality. My analysis sheds light on tensions between the types of diversity, challenging the potential for the framework to address structural inequality via revitalization. While both diversity and mix (mixed income or diversity of incomes, for example) are generally taken-for-granted terms in planning discourse, promoting more equitable planning practices requires analyzing them more closely in context.
Highlights
The main theme that links all of the elements of this plan together is the importance of striving for diversity as a key organizing feature of the revitalization process: diversity of building types, designs and heights; diversity of tenures; diversity and mix of incomes; diversity and mix of uses; diversity of builders; and diversity of activities
It is what will make Regent Park a successful and special place. (Regent Park Collaborative Team, 2002, p. 5). This passage from the “Regent Park Revitalization Study” regarding a public housing project in Toronto, Canada seems almost comic in its employment of diversity talk
While the motto originally referred to the diversity among the seven municipalities that were amalgamated in the late 1990s, contemporary observers, as well as those who invoke the motto, use it to refer to Toronto’s “cultural diversity.”
Summary
The main theme that links all of the elements of this plan together is the importance of striving for diversity as a key organizing feature of the revitalization process: diversity of building types, designs and heights; diversity of tenures; diversity and mix of incomes; diversity and mix of uses; diversity of builders; and diversity of activities. Ellen Berrey (2015) explores the links between equity and the different usages of diversity in the context of different interest groups (not urban planning) in a Chicago neighbourhood, Rogers Park, while Mariana Valverde (2008) examines the use of the term diversity in a socio-legal framework in Toronto. Both highlight the contested nature of diversity and its malleability and provide insight into how the materials they study use diversity in contradictory ways in different contexts.
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