Homes, Kitchens, Cupboards, and Food Rooms: Shifting Foodscapes in Toronto’s Regent Park

Toronto’s Regent Park, Canada’s first and largest subsidized housing complex, is currently being restructured through a $1.5 billion public-private partnership which is significantly altering the material and socioeconomic make-up of the area. The Regent Park Revitalization is framed within the media and by policymakers as overwhelmingly positive and as benefiting long-term, low-income residents by economically, spatially, and socially integrating the neighbourhood into the City of Toronto. This dissertation examines the impacts of mixed-income housing development on gendered experiences of shifting foodscapes and argues that food is an important lens for understanding how poverty is portrayed and experienced. By employing an archival analysis of the history of Cabbagetown and Regent Park, paired with a qualitative understanding of lone mothers’ everyday lived experiences gained through eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, this research argues that food and gender have been, and continue to be, central to understandings of poverty associated with the area. Foodscapes is a place-based and relational concept that articulates the connection between the objective physical landscape of food provision and the social, cultural, political, and subjective experiences of food. This dissertation explores the tension between integration and displacement and argues that foodscapes are key sites for unpacking and illustrating these dynamics. It argues that the positive narratives of integration and accessible consumption associated with the celebration of new foodscapes obscures the role that new foodscapes play in exacerbating and heightening inequality and disparity by displacing and delegitimizing food-based relationships and coping strategies low-income women rely on. This study problematizes underlying assumptions about mixed-income housing developments as a poverty alleviation strategy while simultaneously documenting the food procurement strategies and food-related advocacy, creativity, resourcefulness, agency, and institutions that lone mothers living through the Regent Park Revitalization employ to sustain social networks, provide food, and contest narratives about the Regent Park Revitalization.

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