As Canada’s largest social housing project, the Regent Park area is going through a major revitalization process. Regent Park is quickly becoming the hub of social and cultural activity. Regent Park residents have embraced the notion that the health of their community can be dramatically improved through combining social goals with business development goals, tradition with innovation, and forming partnerships that enhance the diversity of the Regent Park community. The Regent Park Sewing Studio is one such project.

The spirit of entrepreneurship is universal, traditional skill sets like sewing, woodworking, tilling the land, or harnessing the medicinal potential of local plants, have always found their way into the social processes of technological development. Through the novel application of empirical knowledge and its integration with market-based economies and manufacturing networks, hybrid forms such the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), the Centre of Opportunities for Regent Park Enterprises (CORE), the Daniels Corporation, and Women’s Sewing Studio are finding new platforms for expression.

 Skills that would have been utilised in the traditional production of homemade clothing and other objects household objects are now channelled into making clutch bags, children’s toys, and Yoga bags for trendy urban dwellers looking for that cool-factor object with elements of the authentic.

The presentation allowed both the members of Women’s Sewing Studio and the OCAD students to test-drive their skills and concepts in the context of a commercial milieu. The merger, while contemporary in its trappings (gallery/studio), was none-the-less also grounded in the human dimension, which, when it comes to shaping the social aspects of community building is more or less still intact, and familiar to everyone.

by
Dimitrije Martinovic
Dimitrije is a staff member of the Focus Media Arts Centre.