CIAO DATE: 11/2008
August 2008
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Professor Shahrzad Faryadi was a visiting professor at the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition in 2006-2007. She came to McMaster from the Faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Tehran and spent her time at the Institute examining multiculturalism from an urban planning perspective. This working paper grows out of her research at the Institute. Since 1988, Canada has had an official multiculturalism policy backed up by a Canadian Multiculturalism Act. This legislation provides a framework for the Government of Canada to adopt policies and practices to recognize and promote multiculturalism in Canada. The Act has no direct legal bearing upon other governments in Canada, notably provincial or municipal ones.
In light of this legislative situation, Professor Faryadi asks whether urban planning in the Greater Toronto Area shows any recognition of multiculturalism in the ways in which it is carried out. In posing this question, she is most interested in whether the policies of the governments of the GTA are based on multicultural principles. She adopts a case study approach to this question and looks at urban planning decisions related to the areas of the GTA where Iranian immigrants have tended to settle in significant numbers. In doing so, she defines carefully the criteria for assessing the multicultural character of planning in an area and then applies these criteria carefully to the neighbourhoods in North York and Richmond Hill, where several thousand Iranians have settled. In finding relatively little culturally sensitive planning in these areas, Professor Faryadi’s research raises the question: is the Canadian Multiculturalism Act a largely symbolic gesture by the Government of Canada and one ignored by provincial and municipal governments?
Resource link: Urban Representation of Multiculturalism in a Global City: Toronto's Iranian Community [PDF] - 2.5M