The Quest for an Inclusive City - Metropolis BC

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geography and history of Tamils in Toronto and Vancouver. The third section then draws on our
interviews to develop an account of the challenges faced by Tamil community members, the barriers
to integration, and some of the policy issues regarding settlement. These include the specific
problems facing seniors, women, and youth; and other challenges around identity, cultural
differences, and the urban landscape. In the fourth section we shift from individual stories to an
account of the role of Tamil community-based organizations in assisting the settlement process. Here
we find an astonishing story of self-reliance, of fear (of government, neighbors, police, and so on),
and of isolationist tendencies, but also an evolving story of efforts to work with city officials, police,
service providers, granting agencies, and other community organizations, to further the integration of
Tamils in Toronto. It is here that the Vancouver story diverges dramatically from that of the Toronto
Tamil community, and we speculate as to why that is the case. In this section we also discuss one of
the (many) paradoxes of a multicultural society: the possibility that the very policies that
acknowledge and encourage cultural diversity may also discourage efforts by ethno-cultural groups to
integrate. However, that observation must be balanced with another. A powerful dimension of
newcomer experience is that of not feeling welcome, of not belonging, of not feeling comfortable in
the public sphere; and the understandable response is to put even more emphasis on the importance of
ethno-cultural community. The fifth section draws on the focus group discussion with members of the
CTC to go deeper into the lived experience of multiculturalism. In this section we return to our notion
of the inclusive city and multicultural citizenship, asking whether, over the past twenty years, Tamils
settling in Toronto have begun to acquire a sense of their right to participation, and their right to the
city. In conclusion, we tease out from our focus group session a Tamil notion of a ‘rich
multiculturalism’ that corresponds closely to the normative ideal of multicultural citizenship that we
articulated in section one. From the perspective and experience of the focus group participants, that
ideal has not yet been realized. Thus we spell out what would be involved in moving towards this
‘rich multiculturalism,’ in a policy sense, for federal, provincial, and municipal governments, and for
NGOs.
1. Multiculturalism and Citizenship: An evolving discourse
‘The right to the city is like a cry and a demand … a transformed and renewed right
to urban life (Lefebvre 1996: 158)
In the second paper in this series, Sandercock (2003b) brought to the foreground the
importance of debates about the meaning of citizenship as part of an urban policy response to the
increasing presence of foreign migrants in global cities. Here we want to further tease out an evolving