Urban planning and ethnic diversity: Toronto and Tel Aviv

Israel and Canada are multiethnic societies that employ assimilationist and multiculturalist approaches respectively to the management of ethnic diversity. This article briefly compares the two approaches and how they are expressed in the planning processes of Tel Aviv and Toronto. Our preliminary investigation shows that despite significant policy differences toward immigration and multicultiiralism, for the most part urban planning in both cities remains blind to cultural diversity. Even in a seemingly multicultural planned and coordinated environment, as in Toronto, the physical planning system does not initiate plans that deal directly with ethnic issues, whereas the Tel Aviv example reveals a planning system that is officially blind to ethnic diversity within mainstream Jewish-Israeli society. Those two case studies illustrate that urban planning has yet to find a suitable approach for dealing with ethnic diversity.