This week, team Positive Space was born. Fazra came up with the idea of our team name after we spent the evening walking around Regent Park together and Fazra and Amina reflected on what Regent Park meant to them. “Positive space” reflects the strong community spirit present in Regent Park, particularly before the revitalization happened. Fazra spoke about how easy it was to make new friends in Regent Park and how everybody was always open and welcoming to one another, creating the positive space she knew and loved since birth. This team name also reflects our desire to explore how religion and community are intertwined in Regent Park and how that contributes to a positive sense of community.
Our biggest achievements this week happened during the tour of Regent Park led by Fazra and Amina: we started to forge connections with each other and explored areas to focus our media project on. Both Fazra and Amina taught me more about Regent Park than I have ever learned in my classes during our tour of the neighbourhood and both were incredibly open with their own experiences. We walked on the outskirts of Regent and then through the centre of the neighbourhood, comparing the new developments to the remnants of the old neighbourhood. Fazra and Amina gave meaning to all the places we passed by, sharing stories and memories from their childhood before the revitalization began. Both Amina and Fazra described an idyllic childhood where they were constantly playing with other children in the neighbourhood, whether it was climbing small jungle gyms scattered between buildings or playing manhunt around the neighbourhood and in each other’s houses. They described an incredibly strong sense of community that they feel other children in the city, and children living in Regent Park now, were and are not able to experience. Fazra and Amina’s recollections of growing up in Regent Park not only refute dominant narratives about the old neighbourhood as crime-ridden and despondent, they also show that Regent Park had a stronger and better sense of community than many other places in the city.
Fazra’s sister’s high school lock. (Photo by Fazra)
One moment that stuck out to me during our tour was Fazra sharing that an old lock on a fence we passed belong to her older sister, who locked it there when she graduated high school. I asked Fazra to take a picture of the lock, and we talked about how original members of the community leave their mark on the neighbourhood and are able to remember the time before revitalization. This is just one example of the strong theme of memory that emerged during our tour. While showing me features of the revitalized neighbourhood, Amina and Fazra also pointed out what was not there: they would always mention which building or area once stood in that spot, including their own homes and some of their favourite places to play. For Fazra and Amina, community is most strongly associated with the old Regent.
One challenge we faced was narrowing our focus onto a specifically faith-related topic, one of our goals for this week. While we did begin to consider themes related to community, it became evident that we still need to find the link with faith that we want to explore. This said, we did start to consider the format we will use for our media project. Both Fazra and Amina are photographers, so we are looking into a photography-based (or possibly film-based) media project. We plan to solidify our topic at our next meeting.
For our first week, team Positive Space covered a lot of ground and made great progress towards figuring out our media project. This was enabled by Amina and Fazra’s openness and willingness to share so much of themselves and their community with me on our tour. I can’t wait to see what we come up with next.
The Positive Space team members are Amine, Fazra, Daria and Jaime.