The Research Matrix
Abstract:
Canada is a country built on immigration. Toronto, at 2.5 million people, is a city of cultural collisions. The immigrant population has played a significant role in the formation of spaces within the urban and social city. The demographic shift of immigrants and ethnic concentrations from the inner city to the suburbs is now
re-spatialising the city’s banal suburbs. Malton is one such suburb, now known in planning parlance as an ‘ethnoburb’. This thesis enquiry sets out to study the balance between the social and spatial nature of the ethnoburb; it is as much a challenge of the politics of change as with the role and agency of the architect in suburban developments. This is naturally as much a project of social understanding as it is of design and poses an urgent question: in the ethnoburb how can architecture carve out spaces and aid social navigation between these cultural collisions?
re-spatialising the city’s banal suburbs. Malton is one such suburb, now known in planning parlance as an ‘ethnoburb’. This thesis enquiry sets out to study the balance between the social and spatial nature of the ethnoburb; it is as much a challenge of the politics of change as with the role and agency of the architect in suburban developments. This is naturally as much a project of social understanding as it is of design and poses an urgent question: in the ethnoburb how can architecture carve out spaces and aid social navigation between these cultural collisions?
