City Race Maps...

[adma]

Though in practice, a lot of what's happened in Toronto is not so much ghettoization by ethnicity as ghettoization by "non-whiteness", i.e. neighbourhoods where everyone's some variety of Asian or Caribbean all mixed up together, and you can hardly see the sorts of souls who'd have predominated in said neighbourhoods in 1975...

 

[Chuck]

I don't think it's ghettoization at all, because 1) it is 100% voluntary, and 2) Toronto is welcoming, so an immigrant would not be subjected to the least bit of racism or discrimination had they moved to a 'white' area instead. Today at least (recognizing that Toronto was a different place 2 generations ago), our culturally segregated neighbourhoods came to be out of convenience.

 

[Admiral Beez]

You do realize that in the US context, African American and hispanics each are mostly just one ethnic group, while in Canada, Asian means many different ethnic groups, don't you?

Very true. The term Asian refers to anyone of Asian descent or origin, so that's anyone from the Indian Subcontinent, South East Asia, Eastern Russia, the Middle East, including Israel and any part of the Arab world east of Africa. Asia's a big place.

 

[Long Island Mike]

COOOL: These maps are rather interesting-but you must know something geographically about the cities here to understand these maps and I feel the land areas at least on maps like NYC need to be outlined better and jurisdictions (Boroughs,Counties,etc.) mentioned for reference...LI MIKE

 

[MisterF]

Doady, you can find empirical evidence on the Stats Can website under Community Profiles. You can find the ethnic makeup of any census tract in the country.

95% of Jewish people live within 3 km of Bathurst. Midtown is mostly white, Woodbridge is primarily Italian.

I'd like to see some numbers to back those claims up. As for Midtown, sure it's mostly white but it's generally at least 20-30% visible minority. Neighbourhoods in Toronto that are more "white" than that are rare, and even more rare are neighbourhoods that are dominated by a single minority ethnicity.

If you want to get technical, "East Asians" (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) comprise 11% of Toronto, and South Asians/Middle Easterns comprise 10% of Toronto, and blacks comprise 8%. Meanwhile in San Francisco, Asians comprise 31%, Latin Americans comprise 20% and blacks comprise 8%. I do NOT see how those figures are any less diverse than Toronto's. I think the only difference is there are larger amounts of visible minorities in San Francisco, and they have hispanics instead of South Asians.

And the differences between someone from South Asia is even more trivial than the differences between someone who is Latin American. For example, New York has puerto ricans, mexicans, dominicans, etc all classified as Hispanics. Are you really going to say Toronto is diverse simply because South Asians can be from Pakistan, India, etc? Like I said, San Francisco and New York seem equally as diverse as Toronto, just replace South Asians with Hispanics.

And in my opinion, the reason there is neighbourhood segregation is because of income disparities, not because of racist/prejudice attitudes. Hispanics and African Americans tend to be associated with issues of poverty. Whereas, this is not the case for many asians. It's not like white people never have to see visible minorities. They interact with different groups on a daily basis.

Other cities can have just as many people from different ethnicities, but if they all live in segregated neighbourhoods that's not true diversity. New York has neighbourhoods that are almost 100% asian, 100% black, etc. That doesn't exist in Toronto, where neighbourhoods are far more mixed. Two cities can have exactly the same ethnic and cultural makeup but that doesn't mean they're equally diverse. Or maybe mixed would be a better word.