Riga: Language and the City

Having travelled in other parts of Eastern Europe when younger, I was excited about my first trip to Riga, Latvia, a few months ago. I was not sure exactly what to expect but had an idea that it would feel more developed than other parts of Eastern Europe while still bearing quite some traces of its communist past. The prosperity of the city surprised me – it feels like a wealthy Scandinavian city and, indeed, it has many cultural and business ties to Scandinavia. I did not feel during the course of my week there any hint of a communist inheritance.

I was also curious to see how the ethnic Latvians and ethnic Russians co-existed in this Baltic city. Having read up on Riga before my trip, I knew that Riga is about 42% ethnic Latvian and about 42% ethnic Russian, and thus was not surprised to hear quite a lot of Russian spoken in the streets. It did not take me long to find out that there is indeed some antagonism between the two groups.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the complete lack of any signage in Russian. I do not know what the law is there, but it does not appear to consist of having a Latvian sign at least twice as big as a Russian sign. I saw plenty of English signs. Russian was most noticeable for its absence.

I cannot decide if this is a good or a bad thing – the Latvians were unwillingly taken over by the Russian-dominated Soviet Union, and their culture almost destroyed. Independence provided them with a precious chance to protect and restore their culture. On the other hand, Russians are, unless they are willing to Latvianise, clearly treated like second class citizens. I met one Russian who used a Latvianised spelling on his business cards, but used his native Russian spelling to sign his e-mails.

I sympathise with both groups and cannot help but compare and contrast the situation in Riga with that in Montreal, which it seems to resemble more greatly than that in other bilingual cities such as Brussels. Is it the difficulty in reconciling the conflicting demands of justice for a minority within a minority?

More

Indo-Fijians, Filipinos and Romanians

Winnipeg: it’s a long way from the Philippines. Photo by Jezz

I’ve been pouring over the new 2006 census data on language and immigration released by Statistics Canada last week. Nationally, all of the attention is being paid to the fact that one-fifth of all Canadians are foreign-born, one of the highest rates in the world. Here in Montreal, the focus is on both a surge in immigration (especially from North Africa and China) and the changing linguistic makeup of the city.

Francophones — people whose mother tongue is French — are now a minority on Montreal Island, thanks mostly to high levels of immigration from non-francophone countries. The number of anglophones, meanwhile, has increased for the first time in 30 years. Arabic, Spanish and Chinese have become the fastest-growing non-official languages in Montreal.

But enough with the big picture news; it has already been dissected ad infinitum in the media. What interests me are some of the odd, surprising and overlooked trends in immigration that are having an impact on Canada’s cities.

Indo-Fijians in Vancouver

Looking through the census data, I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly 17 percent of Vancouver’s population now speaks a Chinese language, and I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that China and India were its top sources of immigrants. I was a bit surprised, however, to note that there are more than 17,200 immigrants from Fiji who live in Vancouver. Most of them arrived before 1991, but enough came between 2001 and 2006 (1,670) to make the tiny Pacific island Vancouver’s fifteenth-largest source of new immigrants, after Mexico and before Afghanistan.

People from Fiji have been immigrating to Canada since the 1960s and most of them have landed in Vancouver. The vast majority are Indo-Fijian and they have a distinct sense of cultural identity, not unlike other immigrants of Indian descent from countries like Guyana.

Filipinos in Winnipeg

Winnipeg is not normally a major draw for immigrants, yet it has become one of the principal centres of Filipino immigration to Canada. Winnipeg is home to Canada’s third-largest Filipino population despite being the eighth-largest city (even then, at 694,000 inhabitants, it has only a couple of thousand more people than Hamilton). 6,885 Filipino immigrants arrived in Winnipeg between 2001 and 2006, more than three times as many people as the city’s second-largest source of new immigrants, India. One-fifth of all immigrants in Winnipeg, or roughly 25,000 people, come from the Philippines.

The reason why so many Filipino immigrants settle in Winnipeg is obvious: friends and family who are already there. That’s the case for most immigrants across Canada, whatever their origin and wherever they choose to live. But what is especially notable is that Winnipeg has maintained such a large Filipino community despite continually losing people — both native- and foreign-born — to other provinces.

More

Paris: Beyond the End of History

Quai d’Orsay: From Commuters to Connoisseurs

French culture is dead, Time magazine’s Don Morrison recently proclaimed. Complacently subsisting off plentiful government subsidies, it has failed to keep up and compete with any of the noise issuing forth from the anglophone world. If France’s capital city is any reflection of the country’s cultural decline, one might be inclined to agree with him — superficially, at least.

The museum-like quality of Paris, which remains a sort of improbable continuation of its late 19th century self, has long been lamented. The City of Light is bathing, perhaps, in too much of a stage-set’s glow, and one could be forgiven for feeling like one was traipsing through a theme park when strolling through the Tuileries in the evening - especially since half the park literally serves as a sort of fairground. It’s telling that the two most controversial building projects in central Paris - the reconstruction of Les Halles, a former marketplace turned mall and train station, and the potential rebuilding of the Tuileries palace, are, respectively, an attempt to snuff out one of the few 20th century intrusions into central Paris, and the attempt to restore a building lost to fire in 1871. The recent installation of a bike-rental system has only added further to Paris’ 19th century flair: never since then have there been so many pedal warriors on the city’s boulevards. All in all, Paris is not only ossifying, but taking active steps to turn back the clock.

Place Vendôme: Sepulchral City

Morrison claims that that hope for French culture lies in the twin engine of neoliberalism and the immigrant ghettoes of French cities’ banlieux: the latter providing new twists on what “French” means, the former allowing France to competitively export itself to the rest of the world. It’s true that these two forces have brought considerable change to Paris, though not, perhaps, in the positive ways Morrison expects. The offices of American law firms have quintupled along the Avenue Georges V, and St-Germain has steeply declined from Bohemian Rhapsody to Banana Republic. This sort of sterility, more than the mere preservation of belle époque facades, has paralyzed Paris.

More

Chinatown is Changing

In September, the owner of Swatow, an import/export business, announced he will replace his St. Laurent Blvd. store with a $20-million shopping centre - the first major real-estate investment in Chinatown since the 1980s - that will include a supermarket, office space, a rooftop banquet hall and small boutiques similar to those found in Toronto or Vancouver’s trendy Asian malls.

Earlier this year, a number of new businesses opened elsewhere in the neighbourhood, including the third Canadian location of Xiao Fei Yang, a Chinese hot pot chain with hundreds of locations across Asia.

These changes in Chinatown’s retail landscape - toward businesses that appeal to a wider segment of the population, like young people and Mandarin-speakers from the mainland - are happening as Montreal’s growing Chinese population is becoming increasingly dispersed throughout the city.

“The demographics of Chinatown are definitely changing,” said Ting Kwan Hung, a community organizer who lived in Hong Kong, Liverpool, New York and Toronto before coming to Montreal in 2004. “There are more and more non-Cantonese speaking people and you also see more Chinese youth who speak French.”

Nodes of Chinese businesses and services have emerged outside of Chinatown, especially in Brossard, home to the largest concentration of Chinese immigrants in the Montreal metropolitan area. Other neighbourhoods, like Ville St. Laurent, Côte des Neiges, Verdun and the west end of downtown, also have large or growing Chinese populations.

Now that Chinese supermarkets, restaurants, dentists and other services are found throughout the city, can Chinatown stay relevant to Chinese Montrealers?

“There’s a lot of new immigrants, but they don’t spend much money,” said Tran Tao Cam, the vice-president of the Montreal Chinese Chamber of Commerce. “There are also lots of students from very rich families, but they don’t come to Chinatown. Look at the area near Concordia, along Ste. Catherine. There used to be only two or three Chinese businesses, now there’s 30 or 40.”

Tran worries the high cost of parking, issues with cleanliness, competition from business in other parts of the city and even the rising dollar will keep people from coming to Chinatown in the future. Still, he said, it remains “a very special area for business,” one that continues to draw a large variety of people.

More

Is Civility Just a Mask?

Every so often there is a reminder that Montreal, for all its history as a capital of Jewish culture in North America, still has a problem with anti-Semitism. In the past year alone, a molotov cocktail was thrown at a Jewish school on Van Horne and a bomb exploded outside of a Jewish community centre on Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t so long ago that a Jewish school’s library was destroyed in a vicious firebombing.

Just the other day, a friend told me about this piece of graffiti on Clark Street, between St. Viateur and Fairmount. Someone has scribbled the likeness of a Hasidic Jew with the inscription “Parásit.” It might seem harmless in and of itself, but these thoughtless displays of racism are usually symptoms of a much larger and more insidious problem. If we accept the legitimacy of messages such as this, aren’t we tacitly accepting their message?

Montreal is home to one of the world’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Numbering about 15,000, they live mostly within one kilometre of Van Horne Street between Mile End in the east and Côte St. Luc in the west. Historically, since the Hasidic population started growing in the 1980s, there have been some tense moments in the relationship between Outremont’s Hasidim and their mostly French-Canadian neighbours. Some Outremonters have fought against every one of the Hasidic community’s attempts to make a home for themselves by building new schools, synagogues and businesses.

For the most part, though, day-to-day relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim are civil. (I wrote about this last winter in “My Heimishe Bakery.”) That’s what makes it so disheartening to see this kind of graffiti. It makes me wonder: is that civility just a mask?

More

Fort McMurray Goes Supernova

Oilsands refinery in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Chad Young

VBS.tv, the online documentary arm of Vice Magazine run by Spike Jonze, has a thought-provoking documentary called Toxic Alberta available to view for free (in 15 segments, with some interruptions for ads). The film touches on the extreme environmental impact of tar sands operations; the burning of natural gas to reform bitumen into crude oil is responsible for a staggering 20% of all of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, and this is set to rise as there are calls to quintuple output in the next decade.

However, the film also inadvertently exposes the crisis the boom towns face, in terms of managing a 9% population growth rate. Most cities struggle to deal with 2-3% growth; 9% would be crippling. (Imagine adding another 100,000 people to Montreal in a very short time.) Thousands of people — many of them Maritimers looking for work — have flocked to the towns of Fort McMurray and Fort Chipyewan. I’ve heard stories of people getting paid insane amounts of money — even fast food workers make $20 an hour — and thus everyone with some sort of skilled trade has headed west. The documentary bears this out, with one surveyor mentioning a $10k monthly paycheck.

The problem is that planning has lagged far behind. The influx of newcomers and lack of housing has left many in a quasi-homeless situation. On top of that, the enormous salaries have distorted the local economy; a one-bedroom apartment rents for $1800 a month, and a small house can cost upwards of $500,000. Developers are building everything from dormitory-style bunkhouses, to subsidized apartments. One developer, quoted in the film, says that ‘anyone making less than $70,000 here basically needs public assistance.’

When the boom is over — or if there’s a massive switch to renewables and energy efficiency — what will become of these towns?

Looking for Chinatown

“There’s no Chinatown in Quebec City. There’s never been one,” snapped a research assistant at the city archives. It sounded as if I wasn’t the first to come asking for information. “There were a handful of Chinese-owned stores in the lower city, but it was hardly a ‘Chinatown.’”

Had I been misled all these years? I had first heard about Quebec City’s former Chinatown in the NFB documentary Pâté Chinois. Articles mentioned it in Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail. I’d heard local Chinese reminiscing about it on the six o’clock news. Louisa Blair devotes a chapter to Quebec’s Chinatown in The Anglos.

Then there’s star playwright Robert Lepage, who staged a six-hour opus called La Trilogie des Dragons. It begins in a Lower Town parking lot where the kids, poised to dig to China, realize they don’t have to dig too deep to find it. They discover instead that memories of opium dens, mah-jongg, and Chinese laundries exist very close to the surface. “It used to be a Chinatown,” the play ends, “now it’s a parking lot.” Was it all just exaggeration, someone digging for a story? Well yes—and no.

The Chinese first began arriving on the West Coast during the 1850s gold rush. A second wave came in the 1870s, cheap labour for the cross-country railway, where they earned ten to twenty times what they could earn in Guangdong. The last spike in the CPR railway was driven in 1885, and a discriminatory Chinese head tax was implemented that same year. This made further immigration difficult. Anti-Chinese sentiment ran high and many landlords would not lease apartments to them. They banded together and created Chinatowns.

Some Chinese fled discrimination by coming east in the 1890s. A trickle made it to Quebec City, but most settled in larger cities. In 1911, there were 68 Chinese in Quebec City while 1,200 had settled in Montreal. Nevertheless, their presence was visible. Most ran laundries or restaurants.

More

Where Latinos Speak Korean

Se habla español in LA’s Koreatown. Photo by Hunhee.

Multiculturalism is usually framed in terms of the relationship between immigrants and a “host society.” But what about the relationship between immigrants themselves? In Los Angeles’ sprawling Koreatown, a growing population of Latino immigrants is leading to a cultural and linguistic exchange that is unprecedented in recent American history.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal describes the trend: “At the Galleria, a large Korean supermarket here, store manager Yoonah Yoon greets Hispanic cashiers and bag boys each morning with a hearty ‘buenos dias’—’good morning’ in Spanish. The Latino workers, who make up more than half the store’s 162 employees, answer him with the equivalent greeting in Korean: ‘Ahn-nyung-hah-seh-yo.’”

Korean immigrants began settling along Wilshire Boulevard in the 1960s, gradually establishing a vast Korean neighbourhood that eventually became the epicentre of the world’s largest Korean community outside of Asia. Eventually, most of the neighbourhood’s Korean residents decamped for other neighbourhoods and suburbs around Los Angeles, motivated in no small part by the 1992 riots that targeted Korean-owned businesses above all. Over the course of the 1990s, Koreatown became home to a new wave of immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Despite the area’s changing demographics, Koreatown remained the most important hub of commerce and culture for the Los Angeles Korean community. In fact, in recent years, Korean investment in the neighbourhood has increased, including the construction in 2001 of a $40-million Korean spa and a new Korean shopping mall.

That’s where things get interesting. Many of these Korean businesses draw their employees (and, in some cases, customers) from the surrounding area’s largely Latino population. The relationship is such that many Koreans business owners are learning Spanish—and many Latino workers are learning Korean.

More

The Greeks of Tarpon Springs

Close to three major metro areas and thirty suburbs make up the collection of cities known as Tampa Bay. Starting with Apollo Beach to the south on the mainland, the arc of towns curves counter-clockwise through Brandon, Tampa, Dunedin, Clearwater, and finally ending with St. Petersburg on a spit of land in the Gulf of Mexico. They’re affable places, full of friendly people and a succession of strip malls in varying states of repair. The quality of life is high. The amount of hurricane hits has been surprisingly low. Still, with so much suburban development sandwiched into such a small area, it’s unavoidable that Tampa Bay—once the home of pirates and the Spanish explorers—has somehow faded to vanilla.

But life is not all beach condos and lattes. At eleven o’clock on Tampa Bay’s arc, there is a place where working fishing boats still bob daringly on choppy green water and everyone speaks… Greek? It’s a metropolitan suburb, but it’s also everything you’d expect from a place where people still dive for sea sponges for a living. The dining is unforgettably good, though it’s a stretch to call it “fine,” and you can pick up CDs of the hottest Hellenic pop stars before you leave town for the day. Welcome to Tarpon Springs.

Tarpon Springs has somewhere between 6 to 8,000 Greek-Americans living in its borders, which—incredibly—still only accounts for a quarter of its population. (The entire state of Florida is home to about 150,000 Greek-Americans.) Still, the cultural ties are so strong that Tarpon Springs is the smallest city in the nation with its own consulate. The Greek Orthodox community is still alive and thriving, and the town’s annual Epiphany festival is one of the largest of its kind anywhere in the United States.

More

Are Our Cities Becoming More Segregated?

“Mapped Presence” by blacqbook

According to Statistics Canada, Canada now has 254 “visible minority neighbourhoods”—neighbourhoods that have more than 30 percent of their population from a particular visible minority group—most of which are found in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. When this number was first revealed in 2004, many members of Canada’s mass media saw it as an indication that our cities are becoming racially segregated patchworks of ethnic enclaves and insular communities.

Some have used the number as a convenient way to raise questions about official multiculturalism. Last year, pollster and pundit Alan Gregg wrote in a Walrus essay that the rise of “ethnic enclaves” tells us that “Canada’s fabled mosaic is fracturing and that ethnic groups are self-segregating.” Later, he adds that “this growing sense of separateness can have troubling consequences for national identity.”

More recently, in a Le Devoir article on the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the reporter Hélène Buzzetti rolled out the same numbers to question whether Charter-led multicultural policy might be undermining Canada’s social fabric. Could the rise of such enclaves ethniques be a sign of the “obliteration of Canadian society?” she asks.

But Buzzetti and Gregg, like many others, cite the “ethnic enclave” number without seeming to understand the demographics behind it. In fact, few people in the mass media have ever taken a close look at why the number of visible minority neighbourhoods has increased. (For one, nobody really seems to grasp that Statistics Canada’s “visible minority neighbourhoods” are not actually the same as ethnic enclaves.) The end result is that the media give the impression that Canadian cities are becoming more and more segregated when, in fact, the opposite is true.

More

This is Where You Lived in 2006

New condo tower in fast-growing downtown Vancouver

The first round of data from Canada’s 2006 census was released yesterday morning; we now have an accurate update of city population trends across the country. (We’ll still have to wait for the juicier data on income, education, language, race, and immigration, however. They will be released at regular intervals over the next year.) Are there any surprises? No, not really. The cities we already knew were growing are indeed growing; the cities we already knew were stagnating or declining are doing just that, too. But, as always, the real story is in the details.

First, the broad sweep of things: Canada as a whole grew by 5.4 percent between 2001 and 2006, making it the fastest-growing G8 country. (By comparison, the United States grew by 5 percent, Japan grew by just 0.4 percent and Germany didn’t grow at all.) What makes this even more interesting is that two-thirds of Canada’s population growth comes from immigration; in the more fertile United States, most of it comes from natural increase.

Within the country, Toronto’s suburbs and exurbs are growing like crazy, as is almost every town and city in Alberta. Brampton, a suburb of Toronto, grew by a remarkable 33.3 percent as its population rose from 325,428 to 433,806. (Future data releases will probably reveal that most of this growth comes from international migration—from South Asia in particular.) That’s nothing compared to Okotoks, however: the town just south of Calgary posted a growth rate of 46.7 percent. Greater Calgary as a whole, meanwhile, grew by 13.4 percent, its population rocketing to nearly 1,100,000. Ottawa, watch out!

More

The Age of Chinese Laundries

Chong Sing Laundry, Notre Dame Street

The Chinese laundry seems like such an inexplicable stereotype. References to them still exist—witness Abercrombie and Fitch’s infamous “Wong Brothers Laundry Service” t-shirt from several years back—yet Chinese laundries long ago vanished from the North American landscape. There are no indications today why Chinese people would ever be associated with the laundry trade.

Sixty years ago, the link was more evident. In 1949, Montreal was home to 231 Chinese laundries and they were a fixture of every neighbourhood and every commercial street in the city. Twenty years before that, the number was even higher: 405 Chinese laundries in a city with less than a million people.

Over at Coolopolis, Kristian and J.D. Gravenor—authors of the indispensable book Montreal: The Unknown City—have been digging up all sorts of great material on Montreal’s Chinese laundries, including a fascinating interactive map that charts the location of every single one of them. (The densest concentrations were in the east end of downtown, around the old Forum, near the Main and in Mile End.) These laundries—not to mention the very history of the local Chinese community—are an oft-overlooked facet of Montreal’s past.

More

Gung Hay Fat Choy: Notes from Vancouver

Candy-apple pig’s heads in a chocolate shop in downtown Vancouver

For a Montrealer, visiting Vancouver in mid-February is eerie, at once a glimpse of the future and a visit to some alternate dimension. Fountains gurgle, people sit in sidewalk cafés and flowers are starting to bloom—it’s strange to experience this without having to pass through customs or change currency. No wonder why Vancouver is seen by many Canadians as something akin to our own Hawaii.

It seems fitting, then, that the weather was so springlike as Vancouver rang in the Lunar New Year, also known in Chinese as the Spring Festival. More than anywhere else in North America, the Lunar New Year here is mainstream. A decade ago, it was an essentially ethnic celebration, like in most other cities. Now, it has been fully integrated into the cultural and economic life of Vancouver, just one indication that this city is becoming like Hawaii in more ways than just as a destination for escape. Like the American state, Vancouver is transforming into a multicultural, majority-Asian society.

More

Disneyopolis

New development in Orlando. Photo by David Burnett

“Everything happening to America today is happening here,” writes T.D. Allman in the latest issue of National Geographic. He’s talking about Orlando, the sprawling urban region in Central Florida that is most famously home to Disney World. For Allman, Orlando represents the next generation of American cities, a vast and diffuse cornubation that is truly a manufactured landscape. His article is an intriguing and unsettling look at the future of urban America.

Allman starts by sketching a brief history of Disney World, without which, a local saying goes, “the Orlando region would be called Ocala, a rival town up the road.” It is a history as murky as the water in Orlando’s sludge-filled lakes, made possible by a “sweetheart deal with the state legislature” that places the Magic Kingdom “above and beyond the law.” State safety inspectors cannot examine Disney’s rides and the people who live on Disney’s property—in the faux-historic subdivision of Celebration, or in time-share condos—have no say in how it is managed. Everything about Disney World is carefully designed and controlled, a legacy of Walt Disney’s consternation over the dreary suburban landscape of motels and strip malls that quickly engulfed his original Disneyland in California.

Visiting or living in the Magic Kingdom is an experience beyond reality. In a way, the same can be said of Orlando. Allman certainly makes his case. “The most telling theme park in Orlando isn’t even Disney’s,” he writes.

More