The work of crisis framing: Claims of social justice obscuring a history and, likely future, of uneven investment in Moss Park, Toronto.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]