As another storm of census statistics about language and immigration to Metro Vancouver inundates the media, the data describe the ebbs and flows of immigration and how they are shaping the city's demographic landscape. The real question is this: do these statistics tell what kind of city we are becoming?

Since long before its inception as a quaint outpost of the British Empire, Vancouver has been a polyglot city–for better or for worse. A great exchange of people, trade, and cultures has occurred on this coast for more than 2,000 years between First Nations groups and Asia. However, it is the past 150 years that contain a brutal history of colonial domination and oppression–but also a hopeful story of emancipation and coexistence.

It seems appropriate that 2007 marks the hundredth anniversary of the Vancouver race riots, which attempted to define the city as part of "White Canada Forever". However, this year also marks the 60th anniversary of the suffrage of South Asians and the Chinese, and the beginning of the long road to the universal vote for all Canadians. Finally, it is also the 40th anniversary of the Canadian Citizenship Act, which removed ethnic and nationality immigration quotas and whose legacy is seen in the most recent census reports.

The 2006 census outlines some surprising and not-so-surprising patterns for a city where Lee is the new Smith. More than 50 percent of Vancouverites do not have English or French as a mother tongue. More than half of the population in Vancouver are first-generation Canadians and less than half of the population have lived at the same address for more than five years. Vancouver is a city of movement settled at the mouth of the Fraser River.

In what could be called a gilded age, glass towers seemingly teem with the vitality and possibilities of a new city. But like every other gilded age, there is a dark side to this one, in which human tragedies from a Dickensian novel play out daily on the streets of Vancouver and the region. The recent discovery of 17 migrants warehoused in a 900-square-foot house in Surrey and a child-poverty rate that is the worst in the nation evoke desperate images of 19th-century industrial slums, rather than a modern and compassionate 21st-century metropolis.

Vancouver has been said to be a city that did not have a 19th century, and yet the city is experiencing levels of migration and diversity that could only be found in that century. Where scenes of abject poverty and urban destitution were frequent in 19th-century New York City and San Francisco, it was also a time when these cities created and nurtured civic and cultural institutions and social movements that helped redefine these places. Cities of strangers evolved into cities of citizens.

Vancouver may be regarded as Canada's Gateway to the Pacific, but Vancouver's–and, indeed, the region's–challenge is making this gateway into a home, a great metropolis where people settle instead of passing through. Although Vancouver has developed the urban "hardware" from its dense downtown living, park system, and its collection of diverse neighbourhoods, our city's challenge in the coming decades is creating and nurturing the "software" of cultural, economic, and social infrastructure that unites and knits an inclusive urban fabric and makes good cities great.

Link:
Blog: Vancouver census results: preliminary findings.