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As one of the world's major immigrant-receiving countries, Canada is fertile ground for the study of immigration, settlement and ethnicity. At the beginning of this century, Canadian immigration became an urban affair, a trend which strengthened into the post-World War Two period. This makes Canadian cities especially well-suited for interpretations of the creation and meaning of urban ethnic landscapes. Nowhere is this more true than in Toronto, Canada's most diverse city. Focusing on one of the city's most important post-1945 immigrant reception areas, the retail strip centred around St. Clair Avenue at Dufferin Street, this paper examines how the landscape has evolved due to its ethnic sequent occupance. In changing from 'Little Britain' to 'Little Italy', St. Clair has become a more complex urban ethnic landscape, a territorial history giving spatial expression to immigration, settlement and ethnicity (Hayden 1995).
Urban ethnic landscapes affect the everyday lives of city dwellers. Vancouver's 'monster homes', for example, have become symbols of social and aesthetic disruption in the city's Angloestablishment neighbourhoods. Landscape modifications made by affluent Hong Kong Chinese immigrants have fitted ill with incumbents' tastes and, some argue, veil the real issue - social exclusion of the immigrants themselves. In Quebec, especially Montreal, the Commission de Protection de la Langue Francaise has at different times told Jewish and Chinese shopkeepers that their storefront signs must have a 'marked predominance' of French, while recently, major retail chains have come under pressure from Anglophone Quebecers demanding they display signs in English, and have used the province's sensitive investment image in parading their gripe to Wall Street. Such extreme examples of the salience of landscape can be found on St. Clair too: the sporadic outbreak of inter-ethnic feuding, usually associated with sporting events, reminds the city that St. Clair is the symbolic centre of the Italian community even if the surrounding population is now more black Caribbean and Portuguese. These examples illustrate how urban spaces can and do become associated with ethnicity and how urban residents can act upon that definition. Using a variety of sources, including property assessment records, documentary photographs and informant interviews, this paper provides an empirical overview of the creation of St. Clair Avenue in Toronto as an urban ethnic landscape. Although mainly empirical, I discuss some...