I tweeted this out last night while watching old reruns of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown series. This was a great show. If I were to give everything up and become a YouTuber, this is the kind of travel and food channel I would want to make, except that I would naturally have to add in some equal parts around architecture, planning, and real estate.

The responses to my tweet were of course mixed. Some people agreed and some people didn't. And a few people provided examples of great cities that aren't particularly known for their openness to new entrants -- places like Tokyo. This kind of response is not at all surprising given how divisive this topic has always been throughout history.

But here's what I was thinking:

1/ There are some obvious current case studies. Consider places like Toronto and Miami, where foreign born residents now make up the majority of the population. These are two fast growing and dynamic cities that wouldn't be anywhere near as interesting without their immigrant populations. Certainly the food wouldn't be as good.

2/ Many of the most beautiful cultures in the world are the result of different cultures coming together. Brazil is one example that comes to mind. Throughout history they have been one of the largest recipients of immigrants in the western hemisphere. Sadly, Brazil was also the last country in the western world to abolish slavery.

3/ Rome and Tokyo were cited (in the comments) as two great cities that frankly aren't all that diverse. According to Wikipedia, less than 10% of Rome's population is non-Italian. But Rome, while nice, is provincial these days. And Tokyo, while awesome, has a bit of a demographic problem.

4/ Even if you think a place doesn't have a lot of immigrants and maybe isn't all that diverse, it is still probably the result of diverse cultures coming together at multiple points throughout history. Maybe because of immigration. Or maybe because of something bad like war. Think of the Moors from northern Africa who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and conquered the Iberian Peninsula.

5/ An openness to new people could signal and probably does signal an openness to other things. And since we are living in a world that thrives on innovation and new ideas, being open strikes me as being a fairly good and useful characteristic to have.

6/ Lastly, I come from a family of immigrants. I self-identify as being entirely Canadian. But I had to come from somewhere (multiple places, in fact). And so it strikes me as being odd and entirely selfish to want to block the flow of people now that I'm here and established.

What are your thoughts?

I tweeted this out last night:

blogTO then picked it up and it got quite a bit of engagement.

Some people, okay a lot of people, used it as an opportunity to be tongue in cheek and respond with things like: cheaply built condos, boarded up Starbuckses, Hooker Harvey's, Drake's house in the Bridle Path, the crumbling Gardiner Expressway, and that McDonald's at the northwest corner of Queen and Spadina (this one is no longer a contender for me now that they've gotten rid of their walk-up window).

Of course, there were also a lot of the usual suspects: The Sky Dome, The Gooderham Building (our miniature Flatiron Building), Casa Loma, The Royal Ontario Museum (specifically the expansion by Studio Libeskind), "New City Hall", The Royal York Hotel, Honest Ed's, The St. Lawrence Market, Robarts Library (University of Toronto), and a bunch of others that you might find displayed on the seat screen on your next Air Canada flight.

But I'd like to unpack the initial question a bit more. Because what does it really mean for something to be a symbol of a city? And is there an important distinction between the symbols that resonate with locals on a personal level and the symbols that get exported around the world as a city's brand and identity? Indeed, one of the criteria in most global city rankings is a prominent and recognizable skyline. Icons are important.

Let's consider an example. I agree entirely with Sean Marshall that "New City Hall" is a deeply symbolic building. Built in the early 1960s after decades of work, New City Hall was the outcome of an international design competition. And it was decidedly modern at a time when Toronto really wasn't that modern. Montréal was the biggest and most global city in the country and multiculturalism hadn't yet become a federal mandate. And so New City Hall symbolized our genuine ambitions to becoming something more.

But does the rest of the world care? If you were to ask somebody my question on the streets of Rio de Janeiro or Tokyo, what would they say? What would they remember? The thing about most tall buildings or other city symbols is that they become abstractions. They turn into pictures on social media -- like logos of a company. But maybe that's all we can reasonably ask of the world. Maybe all that really matters is that a symbol has local significance; it's then up to us to export it and tell that story to the rest of the world.

One of the first things that I noticed when I visited Rio de Janeiro a few years ago was the clear fixation on safety and security. There are gates and cameras everywhere. And the guidance you tend to receive from the locals usually resolves around how to stay safe. Don't wander around at night. Be careful when you take out your phone. Be mindful of certain areas. You know, those sorts of things.

Of course, you never really know how dangerous a city is because it's one of those things that's impractical to test. You're not going to wander around dark places just to see what the probability of being robbed is. The more sensible thing to do is simply believe what people are telling you and you observe the cues scattered around the built environment.

The result is a general sense of anxiety. You're not quite sure if all the gates and cameras are truly necessary, but their mere presence makes you believe that they might be. I mean, why else would they be so pervasive? Or, could it be that people are overshooting with their investments in safety and security because, well, fear and paranoia are strong motivators?

I was reminded of all of this as I read through Ed Chartlon's recent book review of, Panic City: Crime and Fear Industries in Johannesburg. The title of his review is Anxious Urbanisms, and I think that's a good way of describing some of these phenomenons. It's an urbanism of uncertainty. I haven't read the book (yet), but it's an interesting topic.

So I will leave you all with this excerpt from the review:

Ultimately, what we might take from Panic City, then, is less a comprehensive sociology of crime in the city and more a method of affective analysis. What the book provides is a sense of the ways in which the emotional sphere organises space, how feelings like anxiety or fear or panic, currently widely distributed across the world, materialise themselves, architecturally and politically. If immunity is anything like security, Murray offers us a cautionary tale. For wherever uncertainty thrives, so does the tendency towards paranoid thinking—which is to say, a contagion of a different sort, one that licences regimes of suspicion, self-protection and individual security, and all at the eventual cost of collective wellbeing and interdependence.