Of homes, domains and boundaries: Immigration and the transitions of Toronto’s modernist suburbs

This doctoral research project in architecture aims to enhance critical dialogues between space-focused disciplines and urban and cultural studies. It does so by exploring the relations between immigration and Toronto’s “modernist suburbs,” a remarkable suburban type, influenced by postwar planning in European welfare states, which structured some parts of the city’s metropolitan area from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Initially addressed to middle-class populations of European origin, modernist suburbs have increasingly become home to multicultural communities with complex and distinctive social, cultural, and spatial patterns. The relational specificities between contemporary immigration and modernist suburban space remain underexplored in times of fragmented and profit-driven processes of urban transformation. In response, this project adopts an urban design lens to explore spatial integration, functional adaptation, material transformation, territorial claims, and aspirations for change with urban impacts among first-generation immigrants. Resident engagement with housing, publicly accessible buildings, and their sites is studied for two modernist suburbs from the former municipalities of North York and Scarborough. The mixed research method combines ethnographic inquiry comprising individual and group interviews, site observation, and participation in community events. The emerging practices and narratives are contextualized by and compared with official documents, public discourse, and institutional agendas, as collected through archival investigation, critical document analysis, and interviews with experts. From both a theoretical and strategic perspective, contributions are made toward three interdisciplinary research streams: first, “welfare landscapes,” revisiting the green geographies of postwar urbanism by highlighting their historical transitions and current potential in terms of urban inclusion and community emancipation. Secondly, the work contributes to growing debates on “incremental urbanism” and “soft intensification” by relating the adaptive practices and narratives of immigrants with state attempts to effect change. Finally, conceptual insight is offered concerning the spatial implications of socio-cultural phenomena and frameworks—notably the enclave, multiculturalism, and interculturalism—both broadly and for the specific roles that urban design can play.A general conclusion resulting from this research is that modernist suburbs have been successful in sustaining the integration and coexistence of diverse communities within both residential and collective space. At the same time, their foundational qualities warrant recognition as “basic infrastructure”—a spatial premise whose fulfilment is contingent on specific choices about use, management, and transformation as well as extra-design factors. Immigrants have reused space in ways that help revise dominant understandings of modernist suburbs in terms of zoning, building categories, and property regimes. This is significative given that only limited material changes have taken place due to the intricate interplay of regulatory, financial, and legal constraints along with societal norms, cultural factors, and individual preferences. Against the extremes of radical transformation, on the one hand, and stability on the other, the findings point to the need for an “adjustive” approach able to enhance existing qualities while responding in critical ways to the issues and contradictions. Within this approach, urban strategies can work as a promising terrain for exchange between space-focused and other disciplines. At the same time, the historical fragmentation of modernist suburbs in spatial and narrative terms represents a major challenge to debating common subjects and arriving at fruitful synergies among more stakeholders. Recovering the integrity of these suburbs thus emerges as a critical conceptual step to assess and guide their transition

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