What is the most multicultural city in the world?

Answer 1

Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world with about 50% of the population being foreign born.

As a Londoner who has also visited Toronto I feel the multicultural nature of London can be overstated.

Firstly Toronto has more immigrants as a percentage of it's population than London (50% versus 30% in London). London isn't even top in Europe - Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Vienna all have a higher proportion of foreign-born residents. I think 'white British' is still the majority ethnicity in all but one of London's boroughs (Newham).

But simply out of true multicultural 'feel', I also felt Toronto beat London. While communities and restaurants do cluster in ethnic enclaves in the British capital, such as the Bangaldeshis in Whitechapel, or Turks in Green Lanes, they don't begin to approach the level of the enclaves of downtown Toronto - which are huge ethnic colonies where whole communities live and work. You can genuinely travel the world in one city in Toronto, and go from India to Greece to Vietnam all in one afternoon. Whereas in London you just get sometimes get a vague feeling that one group may be quite numerous in one area. Toronto's main Chinatown is enormous and has a whole community living and working in it - London's is a small street with a some Chinese restaurants where few of London's Chinese community actually live or work. Also London's 'enclaves' are relatively fluid and no one group really predominates anywhere, except white English people. For example, Brixton is usually thought of as a 'Black' area, but even here Afro-Caribbeans and Black Britons don't constitute a majority. London doesn't have anything approximating Koreatown, Corso Italia, Portugal Village etc - despite sizable communities of Koreans, Italians and Portuguese calling London home. I hear this 300 languages sound bite bandied about a lot also, but when was the last time you even saw a foreign language written down in London, whereas bilingual signage (even signage ONLY in Chinese etc) is common in Toronto. How many of these 300 languages are in actual use outside of immediate family circles? Whereas Chinese, Italian, French Creole, Korean, Urdu… all these function as community and business languages for whole blocks of Canada's biggest city.

Another thing about London is that it is more transient than North American cities. Young people and students from all over Europe and the wider world will use London as a base for a while but move on later in life. This makes London very diverse in the 20-30 age bracket but more mono-cultural the older people get. Immigrants to Toronto and other North American cities do so to settle and set down roots, meaning you get diversity right up to people in their 80s or 90s. Those immigrant communities who do settle permanently in London will assimilate into just being British after a couple of generations, whereas in Canada and the US people hang on to their 'ethnic' identities for generations - giving Toronto sizable 'Irish' and 'Scottish' communities, despite their families having been in the country for 4 generations.

I'd be interested to visit New York and compare that city to London and Toronto. Another contender for world's most multicultural city has to be Dubai - with more than 80% of the population foreign-born and representatives from most corners of the globe resident. But you get the sense that it's extremely transient, and as it's such a young city, it's too early to really tell whether true multiculturalism will take off.