Book Description
The impact of immigration on Canadian cities since the Second World War has been profound, especially following the removal of barriers to non-European immigrants in the 1960s and the significant increase in the number of immigrants admitted since the mid-1980s. Over two million immigrants entered Canada in the 1990s and the vast majority have settled in just a few metropolitan areas, notably Montréal, Toronto and Vancouver. As a result, the social geography of large Canadian cities has been transformed, an issue that has attracted considerable attention from Canadian geographers. In this paper, research on these changes--published by cultural, social, and urban geographers between 1996 and 1999--is surveyed. This work is exceedingly diverse in emphasis and method, and has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the relationship between immigration and urban change, particularly in the areas of housing, the labour market, and neighbourhood life. In general, geographers are emphasizing the complexity of outcomes, highlighting on the one hand the importance of local contingency, and on the other the growing connections between Canadian cities and global processes. This research challenges traditional theories of immigration and urban structure, and in so doing will redefine the way we conceptualize urban spatial structure and urban social life.
