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| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
I wouldn't really say that Toronto has such seamless integration. It's really very balkanized, you have entire communities of people that don't speak a word of English, which are often associated with poverty and/or high crime rates.
Sure, go to Woodbridge or the east Danforth and you'll see great examples of well-integrated subcultures. Go to Lawrence Heights, on the other hand, which is near where I live, and you'll see something quite... different.
As for the gays, I'm not sure if I believe that homosexuality really correlates with openness to new ideas. If you consider that preference to be a new idea in and of itself, then perhaps it's true, but also self-defeating. It does seem that gays tend to lean on the political left, but that's hardly a source of real diversity in Toronto.
Don't think I don't know where you're coming from - you and Mr. Florida are both looking in awe at all of the great economic factors in Toronto. I'm with you on those, but there are some very negative political factors that accompany them. |
Apologies. "Seemless" was the entirely the wrong word. I guess I meant it in a relative sense. I live and work in downtown TO, in the Queen West area, and am constantly amazed by the diversity of the area. I compare this to the 11 other cities I have lived in during my lifetime (my father was a pilot in the Air Force), and I have to tell you, no city in Canada compares to Toronto, with the exeption of maybe Montreal. Not even close.
With respect to the gay population in Toronto, again, I should have been more careful with my words. In the The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida says:
"Cities and regions that attract lots of creative talent are also those with greater diversity and higher levels of quality of place. That's because location choices of the creative class are based to a large degree on their lifestyle interests, and these go well beyond the standard "quality-of-life" amenities that most experts think are important.
For instance, in 1998, I met Gary Gates, then a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. While I had been studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of the country's high-tech hot spots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared these two lists with more statistical rigor, his Gay Index turned out to correlate very strongly to my own measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index---a measure of artists, writers, and performers---produced similar results.
Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads "non-standard people welcome here."
The creative class people I study use the word "diversity" a lot, but not to press any political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of creative class values. Creative-minded people enjoy a mix of influences. They want to hear different kinds of music and try different kinds of food. They want to meet and socialize with people unlike themselves, trade views and spar over issues."
Is that a bit more clear? I guess I was using the sizable gay population in Toronto as a marker for a city that is generally (and relatively) more open to differences.
Last edited by SuperJimbo on Jul-22-2007 at 01:50
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