Dragon Centre was the first indoor Chinese shopping mall in Toronto and it had a profound effect on the surrounding area. It all began with a poor planning decision on the part of the City of Scarborough. Mohammad Quadeer notes that the stores were small and numerous for the floor area and there were not enough parking spots (2016). The resulting parking and traffic issues sparked racial tension from the surrounding neighbourhood as well as from neighbouring businesses who were in a recession and resented the mall’s immediate success. There were anti-Chinese leaflets and meetings to air grievances about the Chinese community. As Paul Yee explains, “Later that year, a pamphlet arrived at 400 homes, alleging that Hong Kong immigrants were linked to criminal activities in their homeland and asking residents to demand that the government change its “open” immigration policy” (2003, p. 85). This has left a permanent imprint in the memories of Chinese children growing up in Scarborough. In one of the stories shared at the commemoration event, entitled ‘Growing Up + Rapid Growth’, the author grimly describes the context he grew up in, noting, “it was no surprise that there was such a backlash. That was Scarborough at that time, and I always sensed that we were tolerated as long as we didn’t grow in numbers” (see Figure 1, exhibition materials, 2019).
The response by the City of Scarborough was to create a Race Relations Committee and a report on tactics to resolve the tension. While reports may contain actionable items, I would argue that this primarily served as a highly visible PR move by the municipal government, which did very little to improve the situation for Dragon Centre’s Chinese merchants. In Sherry Arnstein’s article “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”, this move would be the ‘informing’ rung of the ladder, in which officials educate ‘have-nots’ about the issue at hand and prevent the affected population from creating change (1969). Granting greater power to the Dragon Centre’s merchants may have led to drastically different incomes for the mall and its future.
Dragon Centre set the precedent for ethnic malls to be built, though many faced barriers due to the community pushback. In 1994 the City of Richmond Hill temporarily froze ethnic mall applications to study parking and pedestrian needs (exhibition materials, 2019). Pacific Mall faced a lengthy process with the eventual re-design including barn architecture of rural Ontario. While consistency with the surrounding built form often remains a central part of cities’ official plans, this is a deliberate effort to quash the Chinese design elements of the mall.
The municipal government could have done more to support Chinese residents in their plans to develop malls. Qadeer argues that planning practice remains in the context of colonial attitudes towards racial minorities and immigrants (2016). This is clear in the lack of full support for Chinese business owners at Dragon Centre despite clearly racist rhetoric surrounding the new mall. There are now 66 Chinese shopping centres in the Toronto Metropolitan Area which were all spurred on by Dragon Centre (Qadeer 2016). Despite the lack of support for Chinese merchants by the municipal government, we can see that a significant number of applications for ethnic malls have been approved over this 45 year period.
Dragon Centre is part of the ‘ethnoburb’ of Scarborough. Ethnoburbs are defined by Li as “clusters of residential areas and business districts” that are multiethnic and generally have one ethnic minority group in “a significant concentration” but not necessarily a numerical majority” (Li as cited in Zhuang and Chen, 2017, p. 277). Zhuang and Chen note that ethnoburbs and Chinatowns differ because “new Chinese communities have better global connections and their transnational ties to the homelands help them incorporate into the host society” (2017, p. 277). This was not the case with Dragon Centre. This mall was successful because of the influx of Chinese from Hong Kong into the area in the mid-1980s who simply needed somewhere to fulfil their needs to shop and use services. People settled directly in Scarborough not into downtown Chinatown and the mall was an opportunity for people to do these things (Tam and Begin, 2019).
The major difference between Dragon Centre and downtown Chinatowns is its suburban location, which precipitated the pushback from the non-Chinese residents regarding traffic and parking. However, not only was it convenient for local Chinese people moving into Agincourt, but it became a hub which drew people from around the Greater Toronto Area. As the story submitted as part of the Dragon Centre Commemoration event notes, “I had no idea as a young 13 or 14-year-old boy that people were travelling from the Mississauga area to get to this shopping plaza” (exhibition materials, 2019). As Qadeer explains, ethnic malls scramble the typical hierarchy of a city’s commercial sector by providing daily use products to high-end goods all in the same space while servicing whole neighbourhoods, communities, tourists and the entire city (2016). Dragon Centre, then, provided an essential function to locals and non-locals alike.
Figure 1 – the ‘Growing Up + Rapid Growth’ story from the Dragon Centre Commemoration Celebration event
References
Arnstein, S. (1969). A Ladder of Citizen Participation. Journal Of The American Planning Association, 85(1), 24-34. doi: 10.1080/01944363.2018.1559388
Qadeer, M. (2016). Multicultural Cities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Tam, H., & Begin, C. (2019). The history behind Scarborough’s Chinatown [TV]. Global News Toronto.
Yee, P. (2005). Chinatown. Toronto [Ont.]: James Lorimer & Co.
Zhuang, Z., & Chen, A. (2017). The role of ethnic retailing in retrofitting suburbia: case studies from Toronto, Canada. Journal Of Urbanism: International Research On Placemaking And Urban Sustainability, 10(3), 275-295. doi: 10.1080/17549175.2016.1254671