Cultural Migration Effecting Built Landscape

Modern cities can be predicted, defined, and compared to other

cities due to the existence of urban models. These models were
observations made of a cities structure by studying the placement of
different activities and housing. The built landscape and social spacing
of a city shows how different cultures tend to stay together even when
they are centrally located in melting pot of all cultures.
One thing urban models dont count for is the social space that
different cultures have in a city. I saw this first hand when I visited
Toronto last summer. The city could best fit under the concentric zone
model as the urban core is on the center of the coast and as you
distance from that core the makeup of the landscape becomes more
rural gradually. Although this wasnt a surprise for me, I was more
intrigued on how different cultures had resided in their own separate
sections of the city, including Chinese, Italians, and even religious
centers like Jewish and Islamic dominant neighborhoods. From this
experience I was able to see first hand how different cultures stay
together through different forms of migration specifically chain
migration and brain drain.
It was visually evident Chinese culture was the most
concentrated group compared to other ethnic and religious
neighborhoods in the city. Ive concluded this was because of Chinas
relative location to Toronto. In comparison to other specific culture

areas in the city, China is by far the most distant form their home
country. Because China is on the opposite side of the world and up until
recently communicating, technology has been dismal, the spread of
influence has not been able to travel a quickly as it does today. I feel
that past generations who have migrated to Toronto did so not being
able to fully embrace the cities culture, purely because they just
werent informed of it. This led them to stick to what they know
resulting in crowding their ethnicity in one location of the city.
Eventually the new access to influence from all around the world
through advances in technology will spread country by country
allowing for a increase in communication resulting in a more uniform
world. This is already taking place in some regions of the world, and
the originally culturally rich, little Italy in Toronto is becoming more of
a novel site.
People do whats comfortable to them and what their use to. If
theyre not use to receiving influences from other cultures they will
only communicate and interact with those of the same cultural identity.
When a mass amount of people that share a ethnicity migrate to a new
region, they stick together creating their own neighborhoods in a city.