An Immigrant Neighbourhood As A Site Of Planetary Urbanization: The Case Of St. James Town, Toronto

Abstract

Immigration is a contested topic in a global reality defined by the spatiality of nation-states. However, in the case of South-North mobility, the public debate usually overlooks the role of colonial legacies and capitalist dependencies in shaping the patterns and trajectories of migration. On the scale of the Global North’s cities, narratives tend to revolve around the immigrant enclaves as problematic or dangerous. This dissertation informs the debate with a qualitative overview of the neighbourhood of St. James Town in Toronto, an area characterized by a strong immigrant presence. Analyzing the spatiality of immigrants on the scale of the nation-state, the city and the neighbourhood itself, it employs the conceptual framework of planetary urbanization to explain the role of newcomers as agents creating and maintaining global flows of capital and ideas, actively taking part in the production of space in Canada and far beyond it. At the same time, this work examines the spatiality of an immigrant enclave as an expression of a settler colonial nation-state, highlighting the vital role of spaces such as St. James Town in global and domestic patterns of precarity and exploitation. Portraying the neighbourhood in a dynamic moment of change, both in terms of infrastructural interventions as well as population structure, this dissertation highlights the resilience and community-formation skills of newcomers as well as the great cost of spatial and social adaptation. It also points out the shortcomings of the planetary urbanization concept, underscoring the necessity to include post-colonial criticisms and a nuanced, multi-faceted role of human mobility in explaining the works of global capitalism.