Negotiated Spaces: Spatial Adaptations of Informal Practices in the Toronto Chinese Diaspora

Abstract

Since the 1980s, gradual migration has transformed Chinese diasporic landscapes across Toronto’s Chinatown and suburbanized Greater Toronto Area (GTA), producing ethnoburbs and new forms of social and spatial communities. While contemporary urban and suburban environments are constantly reshaped by migration and globalization, the small business practices and networks that underpin these communities remain less visible and largely outside of formal recognition and social acceptance.

Existing scholarly research has examined Toronto Chinatown and its surrounding suburbs for its internal social organization, and patterns of ethnoburban expansion. However, less attention has been given to everyday spatial practices and architectural reconfigurations of small informal businesses. These practices materially express how communities adapt and modify spaces to sustain themselves. These spaces remain understudied and continue to exclude the personal stories and everyday lived experiences of its community members. This thesis aims to document and address the spatial transformations of microcosmic environments shaped by informal businesses and practices within the Chinese diaspora communities of Toronto and its suburbia periphery across the GTA. It will identify spatial conditions along a spectrum of visibility, legality, temporality, and across the private-public threshold to reveal how communities subvert and reappropriate spaces in ways that reflect alternative systems of governance and practices outside of formal structures.

This study takes on ethnographic surveying through quantitative and qualitative approach of observing everyday workspace conditions and conducting one-on-one oral interviews with community members of their stories and lived experiences. This information was then spatially analyzed through sketches and architectural drawings, to derive a series of speculative design interventions that experiment with ongoing tensions of ‘negotiating spaces’ across prototypical sites that resist and contest against conventional orders. This thesis argues that speculative design reveals and reimagines alternative spatial possibilities of potential for informal practices to coexist, bringing together these often fragmented and underrepresented logics through architectural tactics across a gradient of interventions.