Integrative multiplicity through suburban realities: exploring diversity through public spaces in Scarborough

ABSTRACT

Questions of “integration” are normatively assumed to promote particular ideals of the multicultural city and lead to a “settlement” culture that bodes well with the hegemonic majority. This paper, however, questions the concept from an alternative perspective – that is, it aims to explore how “integration” is imagined and understood by displaced migrants through the contextual specificities of multiple and peripheral “public spaces” – defined in this paper as the everyday practices of integrative multiplicity. Exploring these questions in Scarborough, a post-war primarily ethno-racialized suburb of Toronto, the unique experiences of migrants, many who have faced histories of trauma and violence suggest that the settlement experience is not devoid of anxiety and pain. Memories of places and communities left behind, sometimes never to be returned to, harness a longing and deeper need for home-making often spilling into the public realm. Understanding public space and its inherent conceptual and political complexity as defined, used, and valued by recent migrants, allows integration to be understood through the dynamics of power relations. The findings reveal how recent migrants not only understand and use the city but also how they reflect upon and envision the city-building process, through their own individual subjectivities of inclusion/place-making and exclusion/displacement. Through such complex spaces of encounter, civic engagement and grounded experiences, the participants frame Scarborough in multiple and metaphorical forms: from a City of Refuge and Peace; City of Memory, Desire, and Imagination; City of Multifariousness; to a City of Civic Engagement and Fluid Resistance. This stands in stark contrast from how the city is framed in dominant discourse and the unsettling debates on how to reform it.

KEYWORDS::

• Diversity
• migrants
• refugees
• public space
• integrative multiplicity
• multifarious integration
• suburbs
• multicultural cities

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dianne Hall, Deborah Martin and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. City of Toronto, Website, downloaded October, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.toronto.ca/committees/council_profiles/pdf/scarb_demographic_page.pdf

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funds received from CERIS – The Ontario Metropolis Centre (2011–2012). This paper is part of a larger project “Integrative Multiplicity through Suburban Realities: Exploring diversity through public spaces in Scarborough”. Outputs from the research included: production of a final report to the funding agency; a two-page research summary for wider public dissemination; a brochure/atlas published with extensive maps, photographs, and annotated descriptions posted on the internet. http://www.slideshare.net/YCEC_YorkU/integrative-multiplicityatlas