Delineating ethnoburbs in metropolitan Toronto

Summary: In this contemporary age of global migration, immigrants and ethnic minorities have become new catalysts for societal change in many North American cities. A transition has taken place from suburban homogeneity (composed of middle-class whites) to suburban diversity, making suburbs new multicultural places where immigrants' place-making is forming new social spaces. Since the term ethnoburb (meaning ethnic suburb) was coined by Wei Li in 1998 to describe a new pattern of ethnic settlement, it has garnered considerable popularity. While an innovative concept, it has three limitations. This study develops it further into an operational model, so that it can be applied to different metropolitan cities for comparison. In this study, we first propose a methodology and experiment with it to delineate ethnoburbs using the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) as a laboratory. We then interpret the ethnoburbs and highlight their social and economic characteristics. This study found that ethnoburbs are real geographical entities and do exist in the Toronto CMA. They add a new layer of social space to the existing multicultural mosaic of the metropolitan region. In importance, ethnoburbs provide a spatial context for significant changes not only in the social and cultural domains, but also in the economic and political realms. Broadly speaking, ethnoburbs, with heavy concentrations of ethnic minority people along with a wide array of ethnic-oriented institutions, are changing the "whiteness" landscape of the Canadian cities (Kobayashi & Peake, 2000).