Between 1948 and 1957, the city of Toronto expropriated and leveled 69 acres of its Victorian streetscape. The Regent Park project, designed to improve what was thought to be a working-class “slum,” replaced the buildings with public housing, set apart from the city on superblocks that obstructed human and motor traffic. Predictably, it didn't end well. Within a generation, the project's design was seen as misguided, and the area was plagued by crime. Over the past decade, the city and its public housing agency have been implementing a comprehensive rebuilding program to turn the area into a mixed-income, mixed-use residential neighborhood for 12,000 people. The scale of the project is impressive, and so is the architectural quality of its first major public building, the Regent Park Aquatic Centre, by MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects (MJMA).
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