The practice and politics of care : social service organizations, community resilience and the redevelopment of Regent Park

Abstract

In 2005, the Toronto Community Housing Corporation began the ambitious mixed-income redevelopment of Regent Park, Canada's oldest and largest public housing estate. The community has long been subject to race- and class-based stigmatization, and today is one of the last areas of concentrated poverty in Toronto's rapidly gentrifying downtown core. A dense and remarkably active hub of non-profit organizations has developed in Regent Park since the 1970s. This thesis investigates the role that social service providers play in enabling community members to navigate and adapt to the drastic social, economic and political changes brought about by redevelopment in a context of welfare state retrenchment and strong government support for gentrification. Academic literature tends to dismiss social service organizations as dupes of neoliberalism, robbed of any agency of their own and complicit in the punitive oversight of the poor. I show that the reality on the ground is far more complex, and that social service providers have exercised a powerful place-based agency by virtue of their position at the intersection of state, market and community forces. At the heart of this agency sits a praxis of care that is attentive to the complexity of ordinary life and responsible and competent in providing practical and emotional support. I argue that together, the social service providers in Regent Park form a "landscape of care" that over the course of redevelopment has afforded the community orientation, stability, space, capacity and the means to negotiate social and institutional power structures, thereby enabling not only survival but adaptive resilience in the face of erasure. Care enables creative reformulations of the conditions and possibilities of everyday life on the margins of the post-welfare city, and can thereby be seen as a form of oppositional politics that, though nascent, has powerful counter-hegemonic potential. I conclude by considering how care can serve as an analytical and strategic framework for community-level actors contending with the disruptions wrought by the messy and contingent neoliberal urban political economy.