Urban Redevelopment and Displacement from Regent Park to El Cartucho

This article addresses the potential for artists and academics to partially redress the erasure of low-income communities caused by urban renewal and displacement. Its origins lie in two presentations at the panamerican ROUTES/RUTAS panamericanas international multiarts festival on human rights, held in Toronto’s Regent Park in March 2014: Mapa Teatro’s Witness to the Ruins, a performance documenting the demolition of Bogotá’s El Cartucho district; and “Urban Displacement and Renewal from Regent Park to El Cartucho,” a panel discussion which included the author of this article. Based primarily on the panel discussion, and on prior experience conducting participant-observation fieldwork in Regent Park, this article addresses how urban redevelopment can yield contingent benefits to poor and working-class city dwellers while leaving the racialized class inequality of neo-liberal capitalism entrenched. It argues that artists and academics working in such contexts would be wise to take cues from low-income residents as to how to navigate this tension between opportunity and displacement, while working to document the nuances of everyday life in communities commonly (and inaccurately) portrayed as hopeless and dangerous. The end result is an oppositional archive that “compensates for loss of urban memory” and “creates new communities of memory for readership,” in panellist Karina Vernon’s words.