ABSTRACT

This paper explores the knowledge production practices and mobilizations in public and popular discourse that have discursively shaped the most recent initiative to revitalize Moss Park and the community center located within it—More Moss Park, a US$100 million public-private partnership between the municipal government, The 519, an LGBTQ-focused community center, and an anonymous private donor. We examine the production of territorial stigma vis-a-vis crisis place-frames that characterize Moss Park as a neighborhood in crisis and how this framing shapes the interventions planned for the park and community center. While the planning process has adopted social justice rhetoric within its public participation activities, we argue that this is actually an indication of the neoliberalization of social justice that works to buttress interventions that will exacerbate the already existing inequalities within the neighborhood while simultaneously undermining more socially just approaches. Through historical and contemporary media analysis and qualitative interviews with community stakeholders, we argue these interventions trivially improve the stigmatized elements of the park, including aging public infrastructures and those that seek refuge in the park, while obscuring, and consequently not addressing, the underlying structures that have created the conditions of uneven life experience in Toronto. We believe that analyzing the More Moss Park initiative through a focus on crisis-framing and territorial stigma exposes key barriers to the types of interventions that may enact meaningful change in the well-being of the neighborhood’s stigmatized individuals and families—and in many cases, actually work to reproduce deepening inequities.

摘要

本文探讨了公共和流行话语中的知识生产实践和动员，这些实践和动员从话语上塑造了最近振兴莫斯公园和位于其中的社区中心的倡议——更多莫斯公园，市政府、关注 LGBTQ 的社区中心 The 519 和一位匿名私人捐助者之间的 1 亿美元公私合作伙伴关系。我们研究了将莫斯公园描述为处于危机中的社区的领土耻辱相对于危机地点框架的产生，以及该框架如何影响为公园和社区中心计划的干预措施。虽然规划过程在其公众参与活动中采用了社会正义言论，但我们认为这实际上表明社会正义的新自由主义化有助于支持干预措施，这些干预措施将加剧社区内已经存在的不平等，同时破坏更多的社会正义方法。通过对历史和当代媒体的分析以及对社区利益相关者的定性采访，我们认为这些干预措施微不足道地改善了公园的污名化元素，包括老化的公共基础设施和那些在公园寻求庇护的基础设施，同时掩盖了，因此没有解决造成多伦多不平衡生活体验条件的基础结构。我们认为，分析更多 Moss Park倡议通过关注危机框架和领土耻辱，暴露了干预类型的主要障碍，这些干预可能会对邻里被污名化的个人和家庭的福祉产生有意义的改变——在许多情况下，实际上是为了重现加深不平等。