“recolonization” and public housing: a toronto case study

Abstract

In their study of the redevelopment of public housing in Toronto’s Regent Park, Stefan Kipfer and Jason Petrunia challenge the Third Way urbanism that largely dominates academic and political debate about housing today. Tracing the limits of “place-based” development and social policy, they argue that “the redevelopment project of Regent Park is best understood as a three-pronged, profoundly racialized economic, social, and cultural strategy to recolonize a long-pathologized and segregated, but potentially valuable central city social space in the name of ‘diversity’ and ‘social mixity.’” Borrowing from both Henri Lefebvre and Frantz Fanon, they achieve a subtle and nuanced analysis of the local class, racial, and gender relations that underpin interscalar territorial compromises.