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This is a language map of Toronto showing the most commonly spoken non-official languages at home. (It only counts individuals who reported speaking a single non-official language most commonly at home, as opposed to multiple ones.) The map you see below is based on 2016 census data, but if you’d like to check out the previous census years, as well as an interactive version, you can do that here at Social Planning Toronto.
The top languages are also listed on the right of the map, with the exception of the gray areas. These areas indicate census tracts where English > 90%. I don’t know why French shows up as #13, since this map is supposed to be non-official languages.
In any event, green represents Chinese (includes Cantonese, Mandarin, and so on). Sky blue is Tagalog. And yellow is Tamil. I’ll let you play around with the map to explore the others. There shouldn’t be many surprises if you know Toronto well, but it’s still interesting to explore the clustering and the percentages. Some of the census tracts have a single non-official language representing 90%+ of the responses.
The biggest gains over the last decade – following the same methodology as the above mapping – were Tagalog, Farsi, Bengali, Arabic, and Pashto. And the biggest declines over this same time period were Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, and Polish. But this data is only for the City of Toronto and so I suppose that a decline could also be because of people relocating to other parts of the region.
A big part of Toronto’s strength comes from exactly what you see in this map: the world in a city.
Tourism Toronto launched a new campaign this week and with it came a great video that has been making the rounds online. It feels authentic. It actually feels like Toronto. Watch it here if you can’t see it embedded below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_tYWIoZzk?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
But why exactly is it a successful example of place branding?
Resonance (place branding consultancy) wrote a post about it and also spoke with Tourism Toronto’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer. Here’s an interesting excerpt about the two things they wanted to achieve in the campaign/video:
“The campaign—and certainly this video—is trying to achieve two things,” Andrew Weir, Tourism Toronto’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, tells Resonance. “First, international visitors tend to think of destinations by country, so we had to connect Toronto to the Canadian story.” He says the sprawling, wild country is still generally known for mountains, forests and wilderness, and Toronto wasn’t connecting to that narrative. Enter the “Canada’s Downtown” identity as a way to both incorporate the destination in a national context and differentiate from it. “Toronto is home of the country’s stock exchange, the center of media, the big sports teams are here, we have the long-run theater productions,” Weir rhymes off. “It is the urban center of Canada.”
The second objective for the campaign (and one held high throughout the commercial) was to be unabashedly proud of the city’s unique alchemy, diversity and inclusivity.
“We’ve seen the foundation for local pride laid by people and brands like Drake and the Raptors and we wanted to build on that, to separate ourselves from other cities. We tapped into that energy that’s embedded in Toronto’s identity and sense of place.”
Pride—and a devotion to inclusivity and openness—jumps off the screen. Given the current political direction towards closed borders and suspicion, the goosebumps pop often while viewing.
At the end of the day though, I think it comes down to the fact that it feels like it captures the zeitgeist of Toronto. As I said at the beginning of this post, it feels authentic. And good place branding doesn’t invent identity. It takes things that are already latent and then exploits them.
It’s either that or I just like seeing the Chinese food place I go to at 3am featured in a video.
I have largely avoided commenting on politics and Trump on this blog, but at this stage it is almost impossible to do that.
Donations are starting to pile up for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as the tech community, and many others, begin to respond to Friday’s executive orders. Lyft announced a $1 million contribution to the non-profit group.
Today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote: Make America Hate Again. And yesterday, his business partner Albert Wenger wrote: Misleading the World on Immigration.
At 6 AM this morning, Richard Florida started a tweet storm where he argued that “Trump’s immigration insanity” will fundamentally threaten the core of America’s innovation hegemony.
(He also argued that Canada, and more specifically Toronto, serve to “gain substantially”, as there will no doubt be a doubling down on tolerance to attract the best talent from around the world.)
The Canadian tech community penned an open letter to reinforce the message that, here in Canada, diversity is our strength. This echoes similar messages from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mayor John Tory.
Mass protests have broken out at US airports (links to photos) spanning San Francisco to New York.
And I am seeing folks from Toronto offer up their homes (publicly on Twitter) to anyone who might be stranded at Pearson International Airport as a result of the orders. Many have even tweeted out their phone numbers.
Everywhere I look this weekend I am seeing these sorts of messages. So while I could remain quiet, that doesn’t feel right. And that’s because what is happening is not right.
This is a language map of Toronto showing the most commonly spoken non-official languages at home. (It only counts individuals who reported speaking a single non-official language most commonly at home, as opposed to multiple ones.) The map you see below is based on 2016 census data, but if you’d like to check out the previous census years, as well as an interactive version, you can do that here at Social Planning Toronto.
The top languages are also listed on the right of the map, with the exception of the gray areas. These areas indicate census tracts where English > 90%. I don’t know why French shows up as #13, since this map is supposed to be non-official languages.
In any event, green represents Chinese (includes Cantonese, Mandarin, and so on). Sky blue is Tagalog. And yellow is Tamil. I’ll let you play around with the map to explore the others. There shouldn’t be many surprises if you know Toronto well, but it’s still interesting to explore the clustering and the percentages. Some of the census tracts have a single non-official language representing 90%+ of the responses.
The biggest gains over the last decade – following the same methodology as the above mapping – were Tagalog, Farsi, Bengali, Arabic, and Pashto. And the biggest declines over this same time period were Italian, Tamil, Urdu, Punjabi, and Polish. But this data is only for the City of Toronto and so I suppose that a decline could also be because of people relocating to other parts of the region.
A big part of Toronto’s strength comes from exactly what you see in this map: the world in a city.
Tourism Toronto launched a new campaign this week and with it came a great video that has been making the rounds online. It feels authentic. It actually feels like Toronto. Watch it here if you can’t see it embedded below.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS_tYWIoZzk?rel=0&w=560&h=315]
But why exactly is it a successful example of place branding?
Resonance (place branding consultancy) wrote a post about it and also spoke with Tourism Toronto’s EVP and Chief Marketing Officer. Here’s an interesting excerpt about the two things they wanted to achieve in the campaign/video:
“The campaign—and certainly this video—is trying to achieve two things,” Andrew Weir, Tourism Toronto’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, tells Resonance. “First, international visitors tend to think of destinations by country, so we had to connect Toronto to the Canadian story.” He says the sprawling, wild country is still generally known for mountains, forests and wilderness, and Toronto wasn’t connecting to that narrative. Enter the “Canada’s Downtown” identity as a way to both incorporate the destination in a national context and differentiate from it. “Toronto is home of the country’s stock exchange, the center of media, the big sports teams are here, we have the long-run theater productions,” Weir rhymes off. “It is the urban center of Canada.”
The second objective for the campaign (and one held high throughout the commercial) was to be unabashedly proud of the city’s unique alchemy, diversity and inclusivity.
“We’ve seen the foundation for local pride laid by people and brands like Drake and the Raptors and we wanted to build on that, to separate ourselves from other cities. We tapped into that energy that’s embedded in Toronto’s identity and sense of place.”
Pride—and a devotion to inclusivity and openness—jumps off the screen. Given the current political direction towards closed borders and suspicion, the goosebumps pop often while viewing.
At the end of the day though, I think it comes down to the fact that it feels like it captures the zeitgeist of Toronto. As I said at the beginning of this post, it feels authentic. And good place branding doesn’t invent identity. It takes things that are already latent and then exploits them.
It’s either that or I just like seeing the Chinese food place I go to at 3am featured in a video.
I have largely avoided commenting on politics and Trump on this blog, but at this stage it is almost impossible to do that.
Donations are starting to pile up for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as the tech community, and many others, begin to respond to Friday’s executive orders. Lyft announced a $1 million contribution to the non-profit group.
Today, venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote: Make America Hate Again. And yesterday, his business partner Albert Wenger wrote: Misleading the World on Immigration.
At 6 AM this morning, Richard Florida started a tweet storm where he argued that “Trump’s immigration insanity” will fundamentally threaten the core of America’s innovation hegemony.
(He also argued that Canada, and more specifically Toronto, serve to “gain substantially”, as there will no doubt be a doubling down on tolerance to attract the best talent from around the world.)
The Canadian tech community penned an open letter to reinforce the message that, here in Canada, diversity is our strength. This echoes similar messages from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mayor John Tory.
Mass protests have broken out at US airports (links to photos) spanning San Francisco to New York.
And I am seeing folks from Toronto offer up their homes (publicly on Twitter) to anyone who might be stranded at Pearson International Airport as a result of the orders. Many have even tweeted out their phone numbers.
Everywhere I look this weekend I am seeing these sorts of messages. So while I could remain quiet, that doesn’t feel right. And that’s because what is happening is not right.
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