Canada has always been a nation of immigrants, and the latest Statistics Canada figures reveal that Canada is home to more immigrants than any time since the 1930s. What is remarkable, however, about the current stream of immigration is that most newcomers are settling in Canada's suburbs. While this may seem quite in line with the aspirations of mainstream Canadian society, the trouble with this trend is that suburbs are peculiarly unsuited to absorb newcomers:
"A concern, said Prof. Siemiatycki [a professor of politics and public administration at Toronto's Ryerson University], is that 'the suburbs don't have the kind of public interactive space that the downtown core has. The subways don't exist, the jam-packed buses don't exist to the same degree. ... These are going to be important challenges for suburban municipalities to literally create spaces of interaction.'
Why is this important for immigrants?
'It's critically important that, as a society, we need to construct pathways for people in the various language groups to move in and out of their own community, as well as make it easier for people who are outside of those communities to move in,' said Tung Chan, head of a Vancouver-based immigrant settlement agency. 'We need to create more chances for people to interact, for people to dialogue and for people to understand each other.'"
This theme is picked up by the organization CEO for Cities, which says that what is needed for many reasons, are Remixing Cities that allow people to:
"...mix and mingle, and share and combine ideas from different vantage points and traditions. That mixing takes place on and in shared infrastructures and spaces that bring people together from parks and markets to festivals and debating chambers, churches and universities. In a city with too fragile shared infrastructures, self-organization can descend into a chaotic scramble for resources. Without shared values and meeting places, cities can fray into disconnected and distrusting communities. Investing in shared infrastructures is not a drain on innovation. In cities, it is a prerequisite for it."
When such infrastructure does not exist, and when people of diverse cultures and ethnicities only encounter each other in unusual circumstances rather than in everyday encounters, distrust and animosities born of prejudices are surely to follow. This is portrayed to devastating effect in the recent Paul Haggis film Crash, which peeled back the layers of a society steeped in racism -- but subtly showed how this pathology is exacerbated by the built environment. The characters are so often sealed in their cars -- and their respective enclaves of wealth and poverty -- and as a consequence are unable to engage in the kinds of casual interactions necessary for a functioning society. Indeed, this is revealed in the very first line spoken in the movie by a character who has just been in a car accident:
“'It’s the sense of touch. In LA nobody touches you. I think we miss that sense of touch so much we crash into each other.'"
The challenges for Canada and other nations dealing with large numbers of newcomers are many. But surely one priority must be to find ways to create a physical environment that can facilitate integration; and this is just as true for immigrants as it will be for our burgeoning population of seniors citizens as well. Suburbia -- where so many of us now live -- is simply incapable in its present form of meeting the range of human needs that will be demanded of it. Our suburban areas are going to need many more services and amenities that can be reached on foot. More than that, they will need gathering places, not just enormous parking lots at the power centre near the freeway. In short, suburbia is going to need to become a lot more diverse physically in order to maintain the ever more diverse society that Canada is becoming.



