Revisiting Markham's town plan : an Asian Canadian settlement

Since the second part of the nineteenth century, waves of Chinese immigration

have left a deep and transformative imprint on Canadian society. Traditional

Chinatowns in every Canadian metropolitan region signal the presence of Asian

communities in the commercial built environment, but the question of Chinese society's

physical imprint on the residential landscape is yet to be fully considered. While the

number of Chinese commercial developments and "ethnic malls" (the new

"Chinatowns") in urban and suburban areas of major immigrant areas has increased in

recent years, adjacent residential neighbourhoods tend to be designed according to

conventional North American models and their English and European antecedents. This

thesis examines the question of cultural hybridity in contemporary architecture, and,

more specifically, the possibility of an urban planning and of an architectural language

inspired by Asian built culture, noting that China is itself in the midst of a huge

transformation. Focusing its research on the proposed master plan for Markham

Ontario, this thesis explores traditional Asian spatial and temporal conceptions

regarding built form and the garden, and the theme of "integration." The counterproposal

for Markham Town Plan presented in this thesis offers a critique of the

proposed master plan by the Remington Group, with a view to better serving a

community who cherishes walk-ability in a dense environment and fluid relationships

between generations. The proposal seeks to provide a built setting for the integration of

daily domestic life with social ritual and the spaces of shared cultural memory.