Ontario Planning Journal
July - August, 2007 Volume 22 Issue 4
Planning Peace Village:
An Islamic suburb in the City of Vaughan
Author: Corinne Yap
(Corinne Yap can be reached at corinne@urbanjazz.ca or by phone at 416-420-4256.)
Just north of Canada's Wonderland, at the intersection of Major Mackenzie and Highway 400 is a suburban community in Vaughan called Peace Village.
Completed in 2001, the houses resemble those of a typical subdivision, comprising semi-detached and detached single-family brick homes, front and back yards, driveways parked with cars and young trees dotting the streetscape. The physical similarities end there, however.
In the middle of the subdivision stands a grand mosque with silver domes, a focal point for its residents. Street names don't end in "woods" or "lane" or "borough," but rather in "Ahmad," "Salam" and "Khan," after the names of famous Muslim religious and civil leaders.
Peace Village provides a fascinating case study of Canada's changing suburban landscape and forces us to ask: Do planners have adequate tools to plan for multicultural cities?
This article will argue that planners do not have adequate tools to plan for multicultural cities, but can begin to develop new tools by thinking beyond land use to consider social, cultural and even religious factors. People who have provided their insight for this article include Martha Eleen, a painter who spent several months living in and painting the community and whose works are shown here as well as Naseer Ahmad, the project manager for the mosque and Peace Village, who is also a member of the community. Peace Village
The Ahmadiyya Muslim who live in Peace Village are part of a sect founded in India in 1889 by Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. In Pakistan, they were persecuted by orthodox Muslims who did not believe that they follow a true version of Islam. In 1974, Pakistan's National Assembly declared the Ahmaddis non-Muslim and in 1984, laws were introduced to punish them for professing, preaching or practising their religion.
While Ahmadis started arriving in Canada in 1940, many more have arrived since the 1980s. It is estimated that approximately 20,000 live in Canada, mostly in the Greater Toronto Area.
Peace Village began with the Bai'tul Islam Mosque. When it was completed in 1992, it was a place of worship surrounded by agricultural fields. Worshippers had to drive to the mosque to attend prayer services, sometimes as frequently as five times per day.
Ahmad realized that the available land, combined with the need for worshippers to live closer to the mosque presented a development opportunity. He and other community members approached Solmar homes with a 20-hectare development plan. Two hundred and fifty homes, ranging from 1,300 to 2,800 square feet sold out soon after they hit the market. In the future, the community has plans to enlarge the mosque, and build a neighbourhood centre and a library.
The developer, Solmar Homes, designed the houses to suit the Ahmadiyya lifestyle. There are separate sitting rooms for males and females and powerful ventilation systems in the kitchens to remove the smell of spicy foods. There are also self-contained units in some of the homes to accommodate the Muslim preference for living with their extended families.
Peace Village is an important case study for several reasons. Both Eleen and Ahmad recognize that since the events of 9/11, there has been a growing unease and fear of Muslims and their faith.
For Ahmad, who continues to develop mosques in the GTA and across Canada, he senses that this fear is sometimes masked behind planning technicalities, requiring him to use more resources and efforts to gain development approval. He hopes that cities would do more to understand his faith and the requirements of a mosque.
For Eleen, her residency in Peace Village provides a post-9/11 opportunity to promote understanding of diversity through her artwork. Social perspectives Martha Eleen offers a unique perspective into the society, based on her experiences as a non-Muslim living in the community.
Eleen notes that prior to her stay with the Ahmaddiya community, she had never lived in the 905 suburbs. Her primary relationship to the suburbs was what she saw from her car, and this inspired her first series of paintings, "Into the 905, the View from the Car," which captured commercial and industrial scenes, and subdivisions from a distance. Wanting to capture the domestic realm at a closer scale, her attention turned to the suburban home.
Her first forays into this domestic realm were not welcoming. With paintbrush in hand, her attempts to capture gas meters and lamp posts attracted suspicious stares and caused people to retreat behind locked doors. It was, in her words, "really conspicuous to be doing something different."
In contrast, her initial experience in Peace Village was very different. Within an hour of her wandering into the community to paint the mosque, a couple invited her over for dinner. They connected her with the mosque's leaders, who subsequently allowed her to pursue an artist's residency in the community.
The initial warmth extended toward her continued throughout the remainder of her stay. It gave her the opportunity to connect with the Peace Village residents and feel a part of their society. Eleen recounts being struck by the incredible sense of community in Peace Village. This is nurtured by the religious focus on the mosque. In addition to being a place of worship for prayer five times a day, it is a social space for serving food and selling books, and a learning space for studying the Koran, after-school activities, and participating in ESL classes.
People of all ages from children to seniors walk to the mosque from their homes and participate in daily activities. It is a community centre as much as it is a place of worship. One of the criticisms of Peace Village was that it would create a segregated community. However, both Eleen and Ahmad have a different perspective: Peace Village helps the community to preserve their culture, traditions and faith, to pass onto the next generation.
According to Eleen, even though the residents of Peace Village live in their own community, their actions and attitudes do not reflect a desire to remain apart. To Eleen, inclusion works both ways, and she had the opportunity to experience being a part of their community, and they in turn travelled into Toronto's Queen West district to see her art show.
Difficulties with the Planning Process Developing Peace Village was a challenge. Gaining approval for the mosque was difficult because the zoning code recognized churches, but not mosques. To overcome this technicality, codes from the church category were applied to the mosque. For example, in an area where there are height restrictions, church bells and spires are able to exceed the height limit. To gain approval for the mosque's dome, which also exceeds the height limit, Ahmad had to name the dome a "church bell" to be able to build it.
However, not all of the mosque's requirements were as easily accommodated. For example, a mosque can hold many more people in its prayer hall because it is an open floor without any pews. Therefore, a mosque's building occupancy load is greater than a church's, causing it to exceed the standards allowed in the fire codes. To overcome this issue, Ahmad had to negotiate an exception by explaining that even though the mosque's prayer hall holds more people, its open concept meant that unlike a church with pews, no obstructions block the exit paths if a fire were to break out.
Ahmad also had difficulty gaining approval for the Muslim street names as city staff were concerned about the pronunciation. However, after bringing in examples of street names from other ethnicities that were also difficult to pronounce and meeting with the Mayor to explain the importance of the Muslim names, the city agreed to approve all of the street names.
Despite the difficulties encountered in the planning process, Peace Village was realized in the way the community had envisioned, and continues to be a success. All of its residents are Muslim and there is a very low resale rate. In his opinion, Vaughan is now a model city in terms of accommodating diversity because the planning and political staff know how to deal with development applications from its multicultural communities.
Ahmad acknowledges that it is difficult for cities to deal with issues they are not familiar with. He has had to work long and hard to overcome the technicalities of zoning and building codes as well as educate city staff and the public about his faith. These factors are making his applications take longer to approve than other developments: it took him 14 years to obtain approval for a mosque in Calgary and five years to obtain approval for a mosque in Brampton. Because non-Christian faiths are among the fastest-growing in Canada, he advises planners to be proactive in educating themselves about their multicultural communities, connecting with them, and learning about their needs.
Reflecting on the original question Do planners have adequate tools to plan for multicultural cities? Naseer Ahmad's experience with the zoning and building codes would suggest that our tools are sometimes out of date. If zoning for places of worship is still based on church requirements, these alone would not be an adequate tool for dealing with the development application of places of worship from non-Christian faiths. Another issue may be the lack of flexibility in changing and expanding these codes. Why did Ahmad have to continue using church terminology, even while he was building a mosque? A flexible system would have allowed the city to expand the zoning code to include the unique requirements of a mosque, rather than impose church standards on a mosque.
In applying our tools, planners also need to think beyond land use technicalities to consider social, cultural and religious factors. For example, because the Ahmadiyya prefer to live with their extended families, their average household size is larger than the Canadian average. Planners making population projections—which are used to determine the need for municipal services such as schools, libraries, hospitals and other public institutions—need to factor in these social differences to adequately provide for their communities.
There are other religious and social considerations. If most of the community lives within walking distance of the mosque, would it still be appropriate to require the mosque to have as many parking spaces as a place of worship where most of its members drive? Future plans for the Peace Village include a neighbourhood centre and a library. What does this mean for the provision of municipal services in the area and what role should the city play? There are no definite answers to these questions, but the dialogue and learning with multicultural communities and amongst planners should begin today.
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GALLERY GOING
The Globe and Mail - Saturday Jan. 6th, 2007
Peace Village Paintings by Martha Eleen
http://www.marthaeleen.com
Review by GARY MICHAEL DAULT
Suburban, but by no means bland
The Loop Gallery $550-$700. Until Jan. 28, 1174 Queen St. W., Toronto, Ontario, Canada 416-516-2581
Toronto-based artist Martha Eleen has made a specialty of painting suburban houses and high-rises -- which she paints (in oils on small wooden panels) not with the modular bleakness one might expect such subjects to generate, but rather with a perhaps surprising chromatic richness and textural lushness.
Normally, Eleen is a drive-by painter. As she wrote in her artist's statement for her recent exhibition, Into the 905: The View from the Car (which has been circulating since 2005 and will be exhibited at the Art Gallery of Mississauga later this year), "My relationship to the suburbs has always been one of a passerby in a car, looking over the highway barricades as the modern buildings rearrange themselves under the vast sky." She actually paints while sitting in her car -- which is why the panels she works on are small (though they are small, as well, because she feels she could not sustain, over a big canvas, the immediacy of the light she is trying to capture en plein air).
For her current project, however, Eleen got out of the car. Peace Village, which opens today at Toronto's Loop Gallery, consists of more than 50 paintings made during a two-month residency this past spring offered in the city of Vaughan by the local branch of the international organization called the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
The project involved Eleen's taking a small apartment in the Peace Village subdivision and entering fully into the life of the mostly Pakistan-derived Muslims there, whose homes and daily lives are built around the commanding Bai'tul Islam Mosque.
The mosque, built in 1992, is the largest in North America and is, naturally, a focal point for the community. It inevitably appears in many of the paintings Eleen made during her sojourn, often as the sole subject of the painting and sometimes as a distant presence, glimpsed between houses.
Eleen's paintings are, as usual, quietly superb. In the mosque paintings, the chalky light illuminating the building is almost prismatically split into a myriad of whites: creams, light yellow-whites, light blue-whites, dove greys, a constructed echoing of the equally complex whites making up the clouds that scud by overhead.
In the more conventionally suburban views of the community's spacious new houses, many with faux-Victorian detailing, Eleen has set up telling contrasts between the earthiness of the walnut-coloured brick of the houses, the gleaming upward thrust of the mosque and the endless blue skies arching over everything.
Some of Eleen's most successful works here are not paintings of the built community at all, but renderings of the ornate fabric of the women's dresses that deeply delighted the artist. These works, given the religious restrictions affecting portraiture, became not only exercises in rich patterning and vibrant colour, but also surrogates for the painting of the women themselves.
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The Globe and Mail
Friday- May 16, 2003
www.theglobeandmail.com
Globe Real Estate Section
(Front Page Story with a full page spread on page 13, with three large pictures of the Mosque, and Peace Village Housing Project)
Housing for the faithful
Religious groups building places of worship first, then developing subdivisions around them
By SIMON AVERY
On the edges of Toronto's ever-sprawling borders, religious groups are turning rural land into fields of prayer, selling home developers and builders on the idea that if they build it, the congregations will come.
As part of a phenomenon tagged by some as "faith-based development," Muslim, Catholic and Hindu religious groups are turning urban-planning tradition on its head. Instead of waiting for places of worship to grow out of the community, they are building churches, mosques and temples first, and then selling blueprints of adjacent new subdivisions to eager home buyers keen on the idea of new communities with a built-in spiritual centre.
Naseer Ahmad was one of the first to test the concept for an Islamic group in Vaughan. The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam completed its first Canadian mosque in 1995 near Major Mackenzie Drive and Highway 400. The stainless-steel domes of the mosque were the most exciting addition to the developing landscape of farms and subdivisions since the construction of Canada's Wonderland immediately to the south. "For many years the mosque just stood in the middle of a corn field," Mr. Ahmad says.
Members of the congregation would drive from all over the city, some of them arriving to pray as many as five times a day. Sensing a business opportunity, Mr. Ahmad approached the landowner next to the new mosque with his idea of a faith-based subdivision.
There were many obstacles to overcome, including criticism that the neighbourhood would be too homogeneous within Canada's heterogeneous culture, and that the community would open itself up to negative branding. "I knew it would be a very good pull. Especially for the Muslim faith," Mr. Ahmad says. "But I had to do a lot of missionary work to make it happen." Built by Somar Homes, the subdivision of some 250 houses was completed in 2001. The buildings were designed to suit the Ahmadiyya lifestyle. They have two sitting rooms that allow male and female visitors to be separated as stipulated by the faith. The homes also feature enclosed kitchens with high-powered exhausts to contain and remove the smell of spicy cuisine.
The project has proven successful to date. There's almost no resale activity within the community, security is excellent because everybody knows each other, and children's after-school lives centre on the mosque where various educational programs are offered, Mr. Ahmad says. In the near future, the community plans to enlarge the mosque, build a neighbourhood centre and construct an Islamic library. The York school board plans to open a high school next to the mosque shortly that will largely serve the Ahmadiyya community. "We want to make this whole area a large Islamic centre for Canada," Mr. Ahmad says.
Ahmadiyya community planners are also preparing for further development in Ottawa, Calgary and other cities. On the other side of Highway 400, in Woodbridge's Vellore Village, the Archdiocese of Toronto has just completed construction of a European-style, 1,100-seat church called St. Clare of Assisi.
The church is no modest affair. Some claim its grandeur is second only to St. Michael's Cathedral downtown. More than 4,000 homes are being constructed in the empty fields around St. Clare, on new streets named after such Roman Catholic figures as St. Francis and St. Nicholas. "I approached the developers and said, 'we just have to build a church here,' " says Rev. John Borean, pastor of the new parish. "This is a project we planned together from the start." The number of homes has "just mushroomed, and there are more to come," he adds.
The church and new subdivision are designed to fit together. In fact, some of the pre-cast units use the same materials as the church. The builders, many of whom are Italian Catholics, are making a contribution to the church for each plot on which they build, Father Borean says. "The majority who bought into the community are Catholic. The church definitely is a major factor for them," he says, forecasting that his congregation will grow to 12,000 from its current 7,000 members. "With the church at the centre of the community, it creates a totally different atmosphere."
Two new Catholic schools are about to be built and more will follow, he adds. Builders say the homes are selling well. Regal Crest Homes, one of several firms building Vellore Village, has sold between 60 and 70 per cent of its homes, contracts manager Art Rubino estimates. The church has proven an attractive selling feature. It gives the subdivision a community feeling it might otherwise have taken 10 years to create, he says. While Mr. Rubino would definitely consider working on similar projects in the future, he says he does worry that the communities should not appear exclusive. "I don't want to send the message that the only way you can live here is if you are Catholic, because that's not true." About 30 per cent of buyers are from other faiths, he says. Nearby in Brampton, at Steeles Avenue and Credit View Road, the Roman Catholic Episcopal Corp. is constructing St. Eugene's Church on a rural plot.
The group also has filed plans with the city to build a 150-unit apartment on site for retired individuals and a community centre. "It's important for churches to be visible in their communities," says David Finnegan, director of planning properties and housing for the Archdiocese of Toronto.
Across town at Gore and Ebenezer roads, the owners of the Hindu Sabha temple are looking for a developer to build seniors' homes on the temple's 25 acres of land, says Kumar Agarwal, past chairman of Hindu Sabha. The temple, which seats about 1,000, was completed in 1995. At the time, there were only about 200 homes in the area.
When the group purchased the land several years earlier, it had to fight for permission to convert what was then a large stretch of unpopulated agricultural land. Brampton city planners reserve land for religious sites based on the population of a specific area, just as they do for zoning new schools, libraries and other services.
For every 5,000 residents, the city reserves land for one new place of worship, says Pam Cooper, a policy planner with the city. For the Hindu Sabha organizers, it's a sure bet the congregation will gradually localize. Census Canada forecasts the surrounding area of southeast Brampton will be home to 37,000 people by 2016.
In Markham, at Major Mackenzie Drive and Highway 404, Cathedraltown, a community of 2,000 homes, is planned for construction right opposite the Ukranian Orthodox Slovak Catholic Cathedral of the Transfiguration. The church serves as the centre of the Slovak Byzantine diocese in Canada, which represents some 15,000 Byzantine Catholics in Canada.
The cathedral's dome is 20 storeys high. Its enormous French bells can be heard for kilometres over the surrounding housing developments and farm lands. And the site even has the blessing of the Pope, who consecrated the cornerstone of the cathedral on his first visit to Toronto in 1984. Only recently completed, the cathedral is estimated to have cost some $20-million. It is the vision of the late industrialist Stephen Roman, chairman and chief executive of Denison Mines, who donated the land and much of the funding. The church is a larger replica of the one in Mr. Roman's home town of Kelky Ruskov in Slovakia.
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Printed from
THE ECONOMIC TIMES
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2734789,prtpage-1.cms
Peace Village is Canada's all-Muslim neighborhood
27 Jan, 2008, 0940 hrs IST, AGENCIES
VAUGHAN: The homes come with separate living rooms for men and women. Streets are named Bashir, Zafrulla Khan, and Abdus Salam. And every house has a view of the mosque, visible from miles around.
This is Peace Village, a residential housing development in a Toronto suburb that caters to Muslims -- but is open to anyone. It grew around a small mosque that sprouted in the early 1990s in a corn field along a desolate highway in this nondescript suburb of Toronto, Canada's largest metropolis with five million residents, where one in two people are immigrants.
Built by a handful of devout Ahmadiyya Muslims -- a sect founded at the end of the 19th century in what is now Pakistan, but considered heretics by some -- the mosque is today the centerpiece of this emerging neighborhood.
Initially, "the main motivation was to bring worshippers close to the mosque," said, developer Naseer Ahmad.. Born in Pakistan, the 54-year-old immigrated to Canada in 1976. From each residence, homeowners have a clear view of the central mosque. Each home has a double garage and a green lawn to trim in summer.
Officially started in 1998, the village is now home to more than 260 upper-middle class families. The area streets borrow names from Pakistan's official language, Urdu, or honor famous Pakistan nationals such as 1979 Nobel laureate Abdus Salam.
Every kitchen is equipped with an extra powerful ventilation system to help clear the air when preparing extra spicy or smoky ethnic dishes. And homes are designed with two living rooms -- one for men, and another for women.
Adil Malik, a businessman, has lived with his wife in Peace Village since 2001. "My children are growing up here. It is really positive for them," Malik said of his three sons. "I have seen other kids (grow up here). Now they are teenagers and they are very productive members of society ... going to university," he said. "We look at it in the point of view that it is a community that supports each other." A house here costs about 500,000 dollars (Canadian, US or 345,000 euros) and strong demand has forced developers to add a second phase, now under construction. "It have given true meaning to (Canada's) multiculturalism concept," said the developer Ahmad, photographs of himself with leading Canadian politicians littering his office.
But even if it was conceived for Muslims, Peace Village is open to anyone, he said. To date, only Muslims have bought homes here, leading some to accuse Ahmad of having created a Muslim ghetto or a segregated community within a vastly multicultural society. "It is a very good neighborhood," he insisted, not a place where poor immigrants are forced to live in squalor. "There were some fears at the beginning" of it becoming a Muslim ghetto, he said. "But the time has proven that it has not become a ghetto. The property values are very high.
There is no violence and the streets are clean." Patricia Wood, an associate professor at York University who has researched multiculturalism and immigration, also defended the housing development, noting that while some aspects of the project may seem new, the creation of ethnic or religious-based neighborhoods "is actually a very old practice" on this continent. "If you look at the history of North America, some of the earliest settlements have specific groups coming and establishing their own communities with their own buildings and their own institutions in very close proximity to one another." There are very few immigrant groups that did not create their own neighborhoods within larger cities, and historically it has been good for them and society at large, she said.
Wood concedes that some people may have some difficulty with the concept, which can also be seen in an all Catholic village in Florida called Ave Maria. Some people have "a more generalized fear of the Muslim community" since the attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed almost 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, she said. Whether it be the Muslim Peace Village, or Vancouver's century-old Chinatown, "there is so much mutual support in these communities that would not necessarily be available in Canadian society." "It's been a very important part of successful migration in Canada and the United States," she said.
Copyright © 2008 Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service
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