Migrants

Brazil's humane refugee policies: Good ideas can travel north, 91�Թ� expert says

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:42:23 +0000

Brazil's humane refugee policies: Good ideas can travel north, 91�Թ� expert says

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 02/12/2020 - 11:42

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In this March 2018 photo, Venezuelan children wait for a meal at a migrant shelter set up in Boa Vista, Roraima state, Brazil (photo by Eraldo Peres/AP Phot)

Audrey Macklin

Topic

Global Lens

Brazil

Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Faculty of Law

Migrants

The Conversation

The global north tends to view the global south as a source of refugees, and it often implements policies aimed at preventing those refugees from reaching the global north.

Brazil recently set a bold precedent that should make those northern states adjust the lens. Its policy toward Venezuelan refugees, in contrast to its wealthier peers, is pragmatic, humane and sensible.

Venezuela’s political, economic and social collapse has generated a population hemorrhage: More than 4.5 million, or one in seven Venezuelans, have left, and most remain in the region. Colombia hosts around 1.5 million. About 260,000 have entered Brazil through its northern border with Venezuela at a rate of about 500 per day. Three elements of the Brazilian response stand out.

First, Brazil has provided basic shelters and services – not detention – to meet the urgent and immediate needs of people streaming across the Venezuelan border into Roraima province. Brazil partners with United Nations agencies, as well as international, regional and domestic aid agencies that contribute financial and logistical assistance. The Brazilian government has also initiated a policy to redistribute arrivals to the interior of Brazil to reduce the burden on Roraima.

In this February 2019 photo, Venezuelans stand behind a sign reading ‘Venezuela-Brazil Limit’ near a border checkpoint in Pacaraima, Roraima state, Brazil, on Venezuela’s southern border (photo by Ivan Valencia/AP Photo)

Next, Brazil has expanded the scope of entitlement to refugee status. The 1984 Cartagena Declaration adopted a regional approach to refugee protection, mindful of the history of Latin American states as both producers and recipients of refugee flows.

The international refugee definition contained in the UN 1951 Refugee Convention is individualistic and requires proof that applicants fear personal persecution. But the Cartagena definition supplements that narrow approach by including people who have fled their countries because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order.

In June 2019, Brazil’s National Committee for Refugees issued a detailed report concluding that the crisis in Venezuela falls under the purview of the Cartagena Declaration. People labelled as migrants elsewhere because they fall outside the narrow terms of the UN Refugee Convention definition are included as refugees under Cartagena.

Bolder step

In December 2019, Brazil took an even bolder step: It dispensed with the requirement of individualized refugee status determination for each Venezuelan asylum applicant.

Applicants in Brazil, with documentary proof of identity and without a criminal record, will receive refugee status without an interview. Refugee status, in turn, entitles them to permanent resident status, access employment, public health care, education and other social services available to Brazilians.

After four years, they may apply for naturalization. Within the first month of the policy, about 21,000 Venezuelans were processed under this new system.

Put this in comparative perspective: Unlike the United States and Australia, Brazil has not set up detention centres, separated families and caged children in order to punish Venezuelans for fleeing intolerable circumstances.

That means that Brazil has not wasted scarce resources on vicious and futile deterrence strategies. Brazil also applies a refugee definition that responds to contemporary patterns of forced migration. And unlike other states with sophisticated refugee status determination regimes, Brazil’s group-based recognition of Venezuelans avoids the creation of a mammoth backlog of Venezuelan asylum applications.

Resources that would have been wasted processing individual Venezuelan asylum claims will be directed at managing settlement and integration, and on determining asylum claims from other places.

Some are just passing through

Not all Venezuelans who arrive in Brazil seek asylum.

Many transit through Brazil in order to rejoin family or friends in nearby states, such as Argentina or Chile. Others go back and forth between Brazil and Venezuela to deliver food, medicine and other necessities to family and communities who remain there. And some do not wish to see themselves as refugees and so do not claim that legal status.

Brazil also allows Venezuelans to obtain two-year renewable temporary resident permits that also give them access to employment and to public services like health care and education.

There is good reason to believe that whether they are admitted on temporary permits, or permanently as refugees, most Venezuelans will go home voluntarily if and when the circumstances that caused them to flee have improved. That’s another advantage of regional integration programs that enable people to live, work and continue their lives in proximity to their country of origin.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro plays with a Venezuelan boy at an event for beneficiaries of a program to receive Venezuelan migrants in January 2020 (photo by Eraldo Peres/AP Photo)

Regional solidarity plays a paradoxical role in Brazil’s initiative. The Cartagena Declaration, as well as a regional free movement initiative under the Mercosur trade bloc, show the emergence of South American co-operation in migration.

On the other hand, President Jair Bolsonaro has not distinguished himself in the past as a champion of refugees and displaced people. One wonders whether his antipathy toward Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro might have more to do with the Brazilian hospitality shown to Venezuelans fleeing Maduro’s regime than solidarity. One is reminded here of refugee politics during the Cold War. But whatever the motive, the current policy has much to commend it.

Not perfect

The system is certainly imperfect. Brazil is a middle-income country, and so the quality and availability of public services is uneven.

Bureaucratic inefficiency and lack of co-ordination among different branches of the state cause delay and confusion. Venezuela is not the only source of asylum-seekers; Brazil also receives asylum seekers from Haiti, Africa and the Middle East.

Local aid organizations struggle to fill service gaps, but their resources are also strained by the surge in Venezuelan arrivals.

The absence of habitable and affordable accommodation is also a massive and critical problem in Brazil. Refugees may have no alternative but to live in extremely dangerous and violent places. Language training is weak, though Portuguese is relatively easy for Spanish-speakers to learn. Even though refugees can lawfully seek employment, some employers still take advantage of newcomers by overworking and underpaying them.

These are problems. But they are better problems to have than thousands of severely traumatized children, thousands of drowning deaths in the Mediterranean and the abuse, torture, rape and killing of people seeking refuge in the detention centres of Libya or Manus Island.

We have something to learn from the Brazilians. If Brazil can find an efficient, pragmatic way to welcome, protect and integrate hundreds of thousands of forced migrants arriving at its border, so can more affluent states. Good ideas –like good people – can migrate north, and we should welcome them.

Audrey Macklin is a professor and chair in human rights law and the director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies at the 91�Թ�.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The migrant caravan: 91�Թ� expert on why it exists and how it came to be

noreen.rasbach — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 12:26:00 +0000

The migrant caravan: 91�Թ� expert on why it exists and how it came to be

noreen.rasbach Wed, 10/31/2018 - 08:26

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A new group of Central American migrants walk past Mexican Federal Police after wading across the Suchiate River, which connects Guatemala and Mexico, in Tecun Uman, Guatemala, on Oct. 29 (photo by Santiago Billy/AP)

Topic

On Oct. 19, thousands of Central American migrants tried to cross the bridge between Guatemala and Mexico, seeking safety up north. News outlets broadcast the painful moans of people being crushed one against the other and the screams of children. We saw the desperate looks of mothers as authorities in Mexico tried to push back the crowd with batons and pepper spray. The following day they were permitted to cross over.

The caravan of 7,000, mostly from Guatemala and Honduras, is heading for the United States.

Once news of the caravan was presented to U.S. President Donald Trump, he said the flow of people contained “dangerous criminals,” and he pressured the Mexican government to stop the “invasion.”

Trump threatened to cut humanitarian aid to Central American countries. He also announced he was sending more than 5,000 troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. As the caravan began to receive more attention, people asked: “Why are these people coming to the U.S.?”

Necessity obliges us to leave

The answer is complex. “Una necesidad nos obliga,” a 20-year-old man told the Washington Post. Necessity obliges us to leave.

As a professor, sociologist and father whose own family once crossed the border of Mexico for a better life in the U.S., I reflected on this. Poverty and violence are the main factors driving the caravan. The proliferation of gangs, narcotics trafficking, corruption and impunity are all endemic problems in Honduras and Guatemala.

Honduras is one of the world’s deadliest places that isn’t a war zone. Droughts and floods have also had devastating consequences on agricultural economies. These people are travelling in a caravan for their own protection, to avoid having to pay a smuggler and to minimize the risk of crime.

A deadly history of U.S. involvement

But the roots of their plight are connected to larger issues and hemispheric politics played out over decades. Rage and threats will not make the caravan go away, as noted in a recent report by research and advocacy group, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Governments cannot prevent citizens from leaving their own countries.

Guatemala provides a great case for how U.S. involvement has contributed to political instability and economic inequality in Central America. The country of 17 million, many of whom are of Indigenous descent, elected their second democratically chosen president in 1951. President Jacobo Árbenz passed a series of populist polices that included land redistribution and expanding access to education for the neediest people in Guatemala.

This angered U.S.-owned companies like the United Fruit Company. In 1954 the U.S. CIA orchestrated a coup and installed a series of military dictators who enforced a crackdown against all government opposition.

This crackdown included dropping napalm on Indigenous villages thought to contain guerrilla fighters. Additionally, military soldiers were ordered to “desaparecer” or “disappear” anyone suspected of opposing the government.

About 200,000 people, mostly Indigenous, were killed in the country. These issues continue to reverberate today as the political class colludes with and protects criminal groups.

Honduras also has a long history of U.S. involvement, both economic and military. The U.S. presence began in the late 1890s, when U.S.-based banana companies first became active there. The U.S. military intervened in 1907 and 1911 to protect U.S. interests and further cement the ruling class’ dependency on Washington.

Honduras has undergone political turmoil since a 2009 military coup against populist president Manuel Zelaya. The U.S. froze aid but it was restored shortly thereafter. Similarly in the 2018 election, the results were contested and the country was once again plunged into a political crisis. At least 30 were killed, most of them opponents of U.S.-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was accused of rigging the vote.

Migrants deserve a fair chance

The caravan of desperate and hungry migrants from Central America did not create itself. It was created by meddling governments and indifferent neighbours.

While about 1,600 migrants have made official asylum claims in Mexico, many are continuing their journey north and Mexican authorities have not tried to stop the caravan.

Guatemalan migrant Ernesto Cayax, 27, feeds his 25-day-old baby daughter Reychel, as he takes a break from walking with his wife Jahana Estrada, 23, and their three children, on the roadside outside Tapanatepec, Mexico, before dawn on Oct. 29. The family joined up seven days ago with a thousands-strong caravan of Central Americans trying to reach the U.S. border, roughly 1,600 kilometres away (photo by Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

In a video message posted to social media President Enrique Peña Nieto announced a plan called “Estas en tu Casa” (You are at home). The government offered shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs to the migrants on the condition they seek asylum with the National Immigration Institute and remain in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.

However, it is unsurprising that Central Americans do not trust their chances for a fair asylum process in Mexico, a country with a high homicide rate and a history of discrimination against migrants. Just a few days ago a photo was published on social media of a group of racist skinheads in Mexico City leading an anti-Central American caravan campaign.

We need to address the key factors that allowed this caravan to exist. We need to prevent powerful governments from meddling in the affairs of other nations. And we need to sanction those who do. These migrants deserve a fair hearing, a chance to ask for protection in the U.S. and a timely and fair resolution of their claims. And we need to stop state-sponsored violence.

Jerry Flores is an assistant professor of sociology at the 91�Թ� Mississauga.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

91�Թ� expert on how Canadian politicians are playing a dangerous game on migration

noreen.rasbach — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 18:02:11 +0000

91�Թ� expert on how Canadian politicians are playing a dangerous game on migration

noreen.rasbach Thu, 09/06/2018 - 14:02

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An asylum-seeker saying he’s from Eritrea is confronted by an RCMP officer as he enters Canada from the United States on Aug. 21 (photo by Paul Chiasson/CP)

Craig Damian Smith

Topic

City & Culture

Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

Canada has joined the club of states embroiled with irregular migration. But our challenges are not unique, and we have two decades of European misadventures with irregular migration to guide our response. Unfortunately, Canadian politicians are following a well-rehearsed script in which crisis responses to anti-refugee sentiment undermine liberal values, limit policy options and open us to blackmail by hostile neighbours.

I have spent several years studying Europe’s relationship with irregular migration, most recently on a six-week trip that included looking at the Italian government’s hardline policies.

Interior Minister Matteo Salvini came to power on a promise to expel 500,000 migrants, and has spent his short tenure repealing services, criminalizing migrant rescue NGOs, fostering xenophobic nationalism and undermining European solidarity.

Salvini attends a news conference after meeting Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Milan, Italy, in August (photo by Luca Bruno/AP)

Salvini, also serving as deputy prime minister, blames migrants for longstanding Italian social problems like youth unemployment. In June, Tito Boeri, head of the Italian pension agency, clashed with Salvini on a very simple point that immigration was needed in light of an aging workforce. Salvini responded by stating that the tenured economist “lives on Mars” and that evidence-based arguments about demographics “ignored the will” of Italians.

This kind of populism has troubling parallels in Canada. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has blamed asylum-seekers for longstanding affordable housing challenges and ended co-operation with the federal government on the issue. His stonewalling and scapegoating to foster a crisis in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election are well-worn tactics.

Fears trump facts

Anti-immigrant populism trades on two interrelated trends. First, facts matter far less than voters’ feelings; second, as Daniel Stockemer from the University of Ottawa puts it, scapegoating migrants pays off at the ballot box. Ruling parties are caught in a bind since governments that want votes should be responsive to their citizens. But responding to anti-immigrant sentiments means policies with negative economic, social and security outcomes.

Ruling parties in Europe have tried to thread the needle by getting tough on irregular migration while maintaining open asylum systems. They must show voters that they’re doing something when their political challengers claim they have lost control of borders and undermined public safety. Statements by Michelle Rempel, the Conservative Party of Canada’s immigration critic, about irregular migration are thus wholly unoriginal.

Xenophobia fosters false opinions. Many Italians believe foreigners comprised 26 per cent of the population, when in reality it is only nine per cent. Similarly, a recent Angus Reid poll found Canadians overestimated the number of asylum-seekers by almost 60 per cent. The majority said Canada was too generous, and that the current situation represented a crisis despite the swath of Liberal ministers and range of credible experts saying the opposite.

Crises demand action

Crises demand extraordinary measures. Seventy-one per cent of respondents in the Angus Reid survey would devote resources to border security if they were in charge. Only 29 per cent said they would focus on assisting arrivals. Respondents were more aware of the asylum issue than any other in 2018. But as in Europe, Canadians’ strong opinions are based on feelings rather than facts.

The federal Liberals have reacted by shuffling the cabinet and appointing a tough-on-crime ex-police chief to oversee the issue. But Bill Blair has been named minister of border security and organized crime reduction. While this might seem like a savvy move, bundling migration with security narrows the range of options to reactive and counter-productive policies that exclude economic and social interventions. When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Not to be outdone, the Conservatives would extend the Safe Third Country Agreement to the entirety of the border, meaning asylum-seekers could be turned back anywhere.

Securitizing borders is expensive, rarely works for long and undermines refugee protection. It also results in more criminality. Prohibition in the face of high demand fosters black market supply. Illicit economies and more dangerous routes also make migrants vulnerable to human trafficking.

What’s more, criminalizing migrants reduces policy options. Politicians in Europe are obsessed with “breaking” smuggling rings, with little interest in the supply/demand logics that drive them. Irregular migration becomes more spectacular, offering politicians fodder to escalate the response. This leads to right-wing parties framing migration as a civilizational threat, the starkest examples of which can be found in Austria, Hungary and Italy.

Maxime Bernier’s tweets about “extreme multiculturalism” and the “cult of diversity” were cribbed from European populists. His break from the Conservative Party in favour of forming an intellectually and morally authentic right-wing party was right on script.

Despite Conservative attempts to brush off Bernier’s defection at the party’s recent policy convention, a far-right fringe party could bleed voters. If Europe offers any lessons, the Conservatives will likely mimic Bernier’s arguments.

That both Andrew Scheer and Michelle Rempel supported far-right activists to score points against Justin Trudeau is telling. So is the fact that Conservative delegates voted for ending birthright citizenship based on apocryphal stories of citizenship tourists.

Scheer speaks at the Conservative policy convention in Halifax in August, where delegates voted in favour of ending birthright citizenship (photo by Andrew Vaughan/CP)

Canadians like to believe we are exceptionally tolerant. Environics pollster Michael Adams argues that Canada is particularly resistant to xenophobic populism, partly because of our immigration history. But the current situation reveals a different story: Canada’s openness is more about exceptional geography.

In a 2017 study, Michael Donnelly from the 91�Թ� found that Canada is no more tolerant than similar countries, and argued our resistance to populism is because we’ve been spared migration crises. That’s no longer true.

Fraying the social fabric

What can be done? The government inherited a broken refugee system from Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, but the Liberals must address unsustainable backlogs in asylum processing, which cascade through the system and decrease people’s trust in its efficacy. Conservatives must ask whether scapegoating asylum-seekers for votes is worth the cost. It frays the social fabric, and will leave them holding the bag if they win the 2019 election.

Political discourse matters. The migrants and asylum-seekers I interviewed this summer told me time and again that Salvini ascension had changed the mood. People routinely approach them in the street to tell them that their time is up and they’ll be expelled to Africa. Italian nationalists have shot migrants in the street. Recall that the Québec City mosque shooter was motivated by xenophobic nationalism. It can, and has, happened here.

All of this might sound like the moralizing of a university researcher (from Toronto, no less), so I will conclude with a national security rationale. Canada’s 2019 federal election campaign will coincide with dates for ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States. While some might choose to come here, the more troubling option is that Donald Trump could send them our way.

Beggar-thy-neighbour policies can be used to exacerbate migration crises, and Trump is nothing if not a zero-sum thinker. As Kelly Greenhill from Tufts University has shown, states routinely use “engineered migration” to coerce or deter their rivals. Turkey did it to Europe in 2016, securing an extra three billion Euros with a threat that it would allow hundreds of thousands of asylum-seekers into Europe.

It would take a profound willed ignorance to assume Trump is beyond engineering a migration event to deflect public opinion at home, influence the Canadian elections or leverage trade concessions. Politicians from across the spectrum have a duty to ensure Canada is not exposed to that kind of blackmail, particularly not for gains at the ballot box. That means de-escalating the rhetoric and co-operating to ensure we have our house in order.

Craig Damian Smith is associate director of the Global Migration Lab at the 91�Թ�'s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: 91�Թ� expert

noreen.rasbach — Mon, 16 Jul 2018 17:44:52 +0000

Why the U.S. detainment of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a disgrace: 91�Թ� expert

noreen.rasbach Mon, 07/16/2018 - 13:44

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Javier Garrido Martinez holds his four-year-old son during a news conference in New York on July 11. The pair were reunited after being separated for almost two months when authorities stopped them at the U.S. southern border (Photo by Robert Bumsted/AP)

Stephanie J Silverman

Topic

The Donald Trump administration is continuing its “zero tolerance” approach to Central Americans seeking asylum at the southern border of the United States.

Despite no evidence that the approach deters asylum-seekers, the administration is prioritizing the use of immigrant prisons or detention centres in their attack.

As a detention expert, I argue that we must not lose sight of how the administration is steadily expanding its detention arsenal under the cover of massive changes to its immigration and asylum architecture.

The mind boggles at the scale and speed of the rollbacks to accessing asylum, humanitarian protection and residence rights, among them:

Withdrawing “temporary protected status” protections against deportation for 200,000 Salvadorans, plus Haitians, Sudanese and Nicaraguans, living in the United States.
Intervening to undermine asylum protections for women and others fleeing persecution at the hands of non-state individuals, including abusive spouses.
Stepping up prosecutions of unlawful entries across the U.S.-Mexico border.
Turning back asylum-seekers at ports of entry.
Hollowing out protections for children not at immediate risk of human trafficking for sexual, forced labour or other forms of exploitation.
Prosecuting parents who pay agents to bring their children to the U.S.
Prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. without preauthorization.

The most shocking of these recent changes is perhaps the Trump administration’s now-revoked order to deliberately remove children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Again, this action was enabled through expanding the uses – and moral and legal thresholds – of immigration detention.

Long-lasting trauma

How did this work? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents arrested the parents and transferred them to detention centres operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.).

Their approximately 3,000 kids became “unaccompanied minors” in the custody of the already under-resourced Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. This ripping apart and subsequent detention of family members in separate facilities has caused long-lasting trauma and anguish, the depths of which we are only beginning to grasp. Psychologists are flagging the lifelong “toxic stress” that has now infected these children's minds and bodies.

White House Chief of Staff John Kelly memorably waved off the outcry and moral culpability for this pointless and needless trauma: The parent-less babies, toddlers, children and youth would “be taken care of – put into foster care or whatever.”

The HHS has found the “whatever” for these asylum-seeking children: facilities ranging from foster homes to blacked-out floors of corporate buildings, a disused Walmart, a Texan tent city, “icebox” cages and plans to detain children and families on military bases, among them.

Lidia Karine Souza hugs her son Diogo De Olivera Filho at a news conference in Chicago on June 28. A federal judge ordered the immediate release from detention of the nine-year-old Diogo, who was separated from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border in May (photo by Charles Rex Arbogast/AP)

The breadth of the Trump administration’s recent expansion of its detention architecture is stunning: The federal government is operating at least 100 detention sites with or without the local co-operation of municipalities.

Detention has flown under the public radar for too long. Warnings and protests from current and former detainees, civil society and researchers have not been widely heeded.

The U.S. is flouting international and domestic rules on detention. It engages in co-mingling of children and adults in detention and prisons, and won’t reunite all of the “tender age” kids – those under five years old – with their parents outside of detention.

The American immigration detention system must be called what it is: abusive, racist, sexist and haphazardly implemented with a dysfunctional but financially profitable bail system. The system is designed not to administer asylum claims, but to punish and even terrorize people attempting to realize their rights.

Pilot projects show that asylum-seekers with proper legal, social, health and other supports will appear for their court hearings; there is no need to detain them or, as we do in Canada too, shackle them with remotely controlled surveillance tools.

Let us not forget that the Trump administration ended the family case management program, an alternative that would have kept families together, and for less money.

The Trump administration is now working to exploit a legal loophole to keep children and their parents in detention together past the 20-day limit set by the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement. They are asking for “consent” for indefinite detention together and offering deportation to parents as the alternative.

Under cover of massive curtailment of protections extended to asylum-seekers and other migrants, the Trump administration is trying to normalize detention for children and adults alike, a truly reprehensible agenda.

Stephanie J Silverman is an adjunct professor at the 91�Թ�.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Future city builders: Karimah Gheddai and Shaimaa Atef

Romi Levine — Mon, 26 Sep 2016 17:09:03 +0000

Future city builders: Karimah Gheddai and Shaimaa Atef

Romi Levine Mon, 09/26/2016 - 13:09

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Karimah Gheddai and Shaimaa Atef (Photo by Romi Levine)

Romi Levine

Author legacy

Romi Levine

Topic

City & Culture

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture

They're the new generation of Toronto city builders.

Meet the ambitious 91�Թ� students and recent grads poised to become big players in shaping the city’s identity and contributing to its growth.

This ongoing series from Romi Levine, who covers the city beat for 91�Թ� News, shares their stories.

Toronto’s best qualities are the ones long-time residents often take for granted.

But for those who’ve moved to the city from elsewhere, those same qualities were imperative to making Toronto feel like home.

Just ask 91�Թ� Masters of urban design grads Karimah Gheddai and Shaimaa Atef.

“I live in one of the best cities in the world,” says Gheddai. “Every day I’m marvelled at how people can get along here. You wouldn’t see this anywhere else.”

“There are so many festivals like the Greek and Polish festivals… You really get to live that home-feeling even if it’s just for a little while,” Atef says.

Gheddai grew up in Nigeria, moving to Calgary when she was 12. After living in a number of cities in Canada, she moved to Toronto.

Atef was born and raised in Egypt, moving here to study at 91�Թ�.

Their connections to Africa and desire to improve the lives of people in their home continent were the inspiration for their final urban design thesis project, which ended up winning the Heather M. Reisman Gold Medal in Design in 2015 – the most prestigious award for graduating students of Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design’s urban design program.

For the project, Gheddai and Atef looked at ways to transform informal settlements in African cities to better the lives of those who live in them.

These settlements are usually built without proper planning and often illegally, usually accommodating an influx of people, often migrants or populations coming from rural areas.

Gheddai and Atef focused on some of the oldest settlements in Africa, located in Cairo, Egypt and some of the newest in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

“Seventy per cent of [Dar es Salaam] is informal settlements, which is huge and only growing,” says Gheddai, who has worked in the Tanzanian city for the Canadian government.

(below: a rendering of the proposed settlement in Dar es Salaam, by Karimah Gheddai)

The graduate students created a new design for informal settlements that would foster healthy growth – “a prototype for African cities,” that could be used all over the world, says Gheddai.

Informal settlements continue to grow without proper planning, regulation and safety precautions.

“I always had the feeling that there has to be a way to help them. There has to be a way to reconnect the broken link between the government and those dwellers,” says Atef.

There are a number of ways Gheddai and Atef propose doing so, such as “upgrading accessibility to infrastructure, accessibility into the settlement, redeveloping the market network within the settlement and anticipating the growth in between spaces,” says Atef.

(below: a rendering of part of the proposed settlement in Cairo, by Shaimaa Atef)

Gheddai and Atef say many of their ideas were shaped by their experience in Toronto.

“Maybe we didn’t think about it, but we got a lot of inspiration the way the city of Toronto works. From urban agriculture to the entrepreneurship hubs, you have to take the best from everywhere and try and implement it in other places,” says Gheddai.

And the celebration of diversity that made Toronto such a welcoming place for Gheddai and Atef – that could be the city’s greatest export.

“With informal settlements like in Dar es Salaam, people come from the villages, trying to make it in the city – they’re bringing the knowledge and enthusiasm that a lot of people bring to Toronto,” says Gheddai.

Gheddai is currently running her own wedding photography business and a filmmaking workshop for East African women entrepreneurs called Bia-SHE-ara, funded by the Toronto Arts Council.

Atef is working as a junior urban designer at architecture and design firm Perkins + Will.

But Gheddai and Atef have no intention of abandoning their thesis project. They hope to one day put it into practise.

“We are looking to find certain ways to implement that by connecting to UN habitat, by connecting to NGOs back home,” says Atef.

The desire to bring about change in Africa is an ambition they both share.

“I want to move back to Africa and implement strategies, working as an urban designer or in local government,” says Gheddai.

“My end goal is to make my country a better country,” Atef says. “I don’t know how or when, if it’s in my lifetime or the next lifetime, but I would like to make even a small contribution to that.”

Refugee crisis: Canada “could do a lot more” expert says

sgupta — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 12:54:02 +0000

Refugee crisis: Canada “could do a lot more” expert says sgupta Wed, 09/16/2015 - 08:54

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The fleeing Syrians and Iraqis have been “besieged by seemingly endless war, suffering, and fear” says Kislenko (photo above, Syrian Refugees in Vienna, by Josh Zakary via flickr)

Jelena Damjanovic

Author legacy

Jelena Damjanovic

Topic

Global Lens