Haoran Zhang

There has been a constant interest in the literature in the changing spatial relationship between immigrant settlement and ethnic business development and economic activity, particularly for a country in which immigration plays a vital role for the population growth. Through a case study on the ethnic grocery businesses in the Toronto CMA, the paper examines the changes in the spatial distribution of ethnic grocery businesses in relation to immigrant residential settlement patterns for Chinese and South Asian between 2001 and 2011. Methods used in the paper include a comparison study of spatial median centres and standard deviational ellipses, nearest neighbour analyses, location quotients, local indicators of spatial association (LISA) and accessibility analyses. As the two largest ethnic groups in the Toronto CMA, both Chinese and South Asians have experienced suburbanization in their immigrant settlement patterns for the past ten years. For the location patterns of grocery businesses, while Chinese grocery businesses are becoming increasingly more dispersed, South Asian grocery businesses are becoming more clustered and have closer proximity to the immigrant locus. Since grocery retailing is the traditional stronghold of an ethnic economy and also the most important shopping activity for immigrants, this paper demonstrates that the variations in the spatial organizations and the average store sizes for Chinese and South Asian grocery businesses significantly reflect the different stages of development for their ethnic economies. While the Chinese ethnic economy is in a more mature stage with a higher level of economic integration, the South Asian ethnic economy is in the incubator stage working its way up. The study yields significant implications for long term urban planning.