Valerie Preston

York University · Department of Geography

Settlement services are key to Canada's success in welcoming and integrating immigrants. Offered mainly in person prior to COVID‐19 by non‐governmental agencies reliant on and regulated by government funders, services were forced online and delivered by staff working remotely. We document this transition between September 2020 and September 2021 in...

The COVID-19 pandemic amplified social, economic, and environmental inequalities in American cities, including inequities in commuting and access to employment. Frontline workers—those who had to work on site during the pandemic—experienced these inequalities in every aspect of their daily lives. We examine the labor force characteristics and commu...

Immigrant workers often commute by transit more than other workers. Although immigrants' reliance on transit is often attributed to the same factors as women's reliance on transit: low incomes, limited access to cars, and a tendency to work close to home, gender differences are discussed rarely in analyses of immigrant commuting. Using 2016 Census...

Applying a family lens, the study illustrates how family resources and gender roles shape the entrepreneurship pathways of immigrant women. With its focus on the family, the study contributes to intersectional research about immigrant entrepreneurs that considers the effects of gender and social class, as well as, ethnicity. Drawing on the narrativ...

Drawing on an extensive review of recent literature about resilience and integration, this paper evaluates a social resilience approach to the integration of international migrants in Canadian cities. We advocate a social resilience approach that acknowledges how institutions of all types play critical roles in newcomers’ efforts to establish their...

We examine the social mobility of the second generation in the Toronto metropolitan area by analyzing whether the adult children of immigrants live in more affluent and desirable neighbourhoods than the first generation. Using 2016 census microdata, we compare the social characteristics of census tracts where immigrants and the second and third‐plu...

Single mothers are an important and growing segment of the U.S. workforce. As primary breadwinners and caregivers, they shoulder a 'double burden' that often constrains their access to job opportunities and reinforces their commuting challenges. In the urban areas where most single mothers live, ongoing transformations of the built environment asso...

International migration, movements of people who leave one country to settle in another, has stimulated a voluminous and growing geographical literature that examines the volume and diversity of migration flows, their meanings for migrants and the societies where they settle, and representations of migration. Contemporary international migration is...

Geographies of home and work have changed as public investment has favored central and distant suburban locations and as income inequality has increased. These changes result in shifting geographies of advantage that (dis)benefit gender and racial/ethnic groups unevenly. We examine commuting differentials by gender and race/ethnicity based on combi...

International migration, movements of people who leave one country to settle in another, has stimulated a voluminous and growing geographical literature that examines the volume and diversity of migration flows, their meanings for migrants and the societies where they settle, and representations of migration. Contemporary international migration is...

In the 1990s, many women commuted shorter distances and less time than men, and research underscored the pernicious effects of racial and ethnic segregation and access to transportation on minority women’s commuting. Since then, growing income inequality and the bifurcation of employment between well-paid and secure jobs and a growing number of ins...

The role of evidence-based knowledge and research in informing immigration and settlement policy is an important but under-examined area of inquiry. Knowledge for evidence-based policy-making is most likely to be useful to policymakers when it is produced collaboratively through sustained engagement between academic and non-academic stakeholders. T...

Work is an important location for examining the heterogeneity of contemporary urban societies that are being transformed by migration, aging, and economic restructuring. At work locations, people from different ethnic and racial groups often encounter one another, regardless of whether they live in close proximity. Work is also a frequent site of d...

Immigrants from Hong Kong are one of the largest recent cohorts of newcomers in Canada. We examine the processes through which the children of Hong Kong immigrants construct a sense of belonging in Canada, their only home. In focus group discussions, the participants express an unequivocal sense of Canadian citizenship and belonging. Yet their iden...

Liberating Temporariness? explores the complex ways in which temporariness is being institutionalized as a condition of life for a growing number of people worldwide. The collection emphasizes contemporary developments, but also provides historical context on nation-state membership as the fundamental means for accessing rights in an era of expandi...

This article compares feelings of discomfort and experiences of discrimination attributed to racial and ethnic difference among visible minorities and two white groups: "Europeans" and "white charter" individuals. In conducting the analysis, attention is given to the role of location by examining how responses vary in three types of locations in Ca...

The relationship between women's domestic labor and employment in the paid labor force is central to current debates about gender inequities in occupations and incomes. Recent studies of gender differences in commuting argue that women reduce the journey to work to accommodate the demands of family responsibilities. The empirical evidence, however,...

The mobility decisions of older people are examined empirically from a behavioral perspective which emphasizes residential stress and inertia. Duration of residence and three personal characteristics are hypothesized to influence stress and inertia. Using survey data from Kansas City, Kansas, a path model is estimated separately for elderly white a...

This paper explores the production of temporariness in Canada, and its implications for the citizenship rights of migrants. It investigates the production of temporariness within three policy fields that are typically not examined together – security, work and settlement. Within these three fields, it considers public policies concerning: (1) secur...

The emergence of a significant transnational community of immigrants from Hong Kong to Canada, and their Canadian-born children, during the 1990s can be understood through the experience of the affect of place, which gives meaning to the emotional experiences of community members. In contrast to theories that treat affect as a preconscious attribut...

We discuss Susan Hanson's contributions to geography during the 1970s and 1980s through the lens of quotidian geographies, geographies of the everyday. Beginning from our own experiences as graduate students and new faculty members, we describe the social and theoretical context in which Susan published her initial studies of men's and women's acti...

KEY POINTS: • Having a university degree does not guarantee better labour market outcomes for immigrants. Immigrants with at least one university degree have lower annual earnings than Canadian-born with the same education. • The average unemployment rate for all university-educated immigrants is double the unemployment rate for their Canadian-born...

KEY POINTS: • Immigrant men and women have lower annual earnings than their Canadian-born counterparts. • Average earnings increase the longer immigrants have been in Canada. There is a large gap in annual income increases with more recent periods of immigration, for both sexes and for most countries of origin. • Immigrant annual earnings vary amon...

Homelessness is a risk for growing numbers of immigrants. Largely as a result of low incomes, newcomers are more likely than the Canadian-born to spend over 50 percent of total household income on housing costs. Many newcomers suffer hidden homelessness. They do not use shelters and other services, but share accommodation, couch-surf and rely on th...

Recently, the media have expressed concern about the apparent concentration and social isolation of immigrants in central and inner suburban neighborhoods in large Canadian cities. This paper compares and contrasts the frequency and nature of neighborhood-based social contacts among three cohorts of immigrants distinguished by their period of arriv...

Discomfort and discrimination experienced by racial minorities is of growing concern. Perceived racial discrimination and discomfort raise questions about social cohesion in pluralist democracies such as Canada and the United States, particularly in immigrant gateway cities that are increasingly heterogeneous. Little research has examined metropoli...

Life cycle effects on the importance assigned to residential area attributes are examined empirically. The family life cycle is hypothesized to affect residential area aspirations through changes in the frequency and location of leisure activities. The results indicate that the importance of eight residential area attributes varies significantly wi...

The Alberta Newsprint Company mill in Whitecourt, Alberta, with its state-of-the-art paper machine dubbed Wild Rose I' is one of the most efficient newsprint mills in North America. This paper documents the systematic drive by the Alberta Newsprint Company to achieve lean production by the use of flexible work practices in a greenfield mill, which...

In the US condominiums and cooperatives have been proposed as affordable forms of homeownership, suitable for first-time homebuyers. This proposal was examined empirically with information from a national housing survey. Discriminant analysis was performed to compare the personal backgrounds and residential histories of renters, traditional homeown...

The City as the Place Where the Work Is DoneMoving among the FaçadesWomen Remaking Urban SpacesRethinking Gender Inequality in Urban Places

Transnationalism needs to be understood as a set of practices fashioned through the life course as well as in relation to contextual factors that include state policy and experiences of discrimination that affect entry to the labour force. The paradox of transnationalism is that families make strategic decisions to separate in order to maintain fam...

It is widely claimed that recent migration trends show increasing levels of transnational activity, but there is a need for a more detailed understanding of the relationship between transnationalism and citizenship participation, particularly from a gendered perspective. A study of immigrants from Hong Kong to Vancouver and Toronto, the largest gro...

Without Abstract

The generality that women work closer to home and have shorter commuting times than men needs to be assessed for racial groups. Statistical analysis of commuting times for a large sample of service workers in the New York metropolitan area shows that black and Hispanic women commute as far as their male counterparts and their commuting times far ex...

The feminization of poverty and the growing concentration of poor people in inner-city neighborhoods are two of the most enduring trends in American cities. More poor people live in cities, and an increasing fraction of the urban poor are women and children. Minority women, often the main bread-winners for their families, are especially vulnerable...

The growing prevalence of shift work and non-standard working hours is challenging many taken-for-granted notions about family and household life. This article examines how rotating shift schedules shape household strategies with regard to childcare and unpaid domestic work. In 1993-94 in-depth interviews were conducted with 90 predominantly male n...

. This article reviews recent research about the spatial mismatch hypothesis from a range of social science disciplines. Since 1990, researchers have tested the mismatch hypothesis in diverse metropolitan settings; devised more accurate measures of geographical access to employment; and developed models to address issues such as compensating variat...

This article reviews recent research about the spatial mismatch hypothesis from a range of social science disciplines. Since 1990, researchers have tested the mismatch hypothesis in diverse metropolitan settings; devised more accurate measures of geographical access to employment; and developed models to address issues such as compensating variatio...

Residential segregation interacts with the changing geography of transport and employment in urban areas to restrict access to workplaces. A growing literature suggests that spatial barriers limit the job opportunities of minority women and men in American cities. This study examines the nature and extent of geographical barriers for minority immig...

Spatial barriers to employment limit women's job opportunities, but their effects differ among racial/ethnic minority groups. This study evaluates the degree of spatial mismatch for minority women and men by comparing the commuting times of African American, Latino, and white workers in the New York metropolitan region. Using Public Use Microdata f...

Condominium home ownership is an important form of housing tenure in Canada's major metropolitan areas, both for owner-occupiers (resident owners) and owners who rent out their units (nonresident owners). Little is known, however, about the characteristics of condominium owners, the attributes of their units, the reasons why they purchase condomini...

PRESTON V. And MCLAFFERTY S. (1993) Income disparities and employment and occupational changes in New York, Reg. Studies 27, 223--235. To determine how deindustrialization and the growth of service employment have affected geographic disparities in income within urban areas, we examined empirically the spatial distribution of household income in th...

The economic well-being of African-Americans and Latinos in the US depends critically on women's employment and earnings. Gender differences in labor market segmentation are central to the spatial mismatch debate, both in their effects on wages, occupation, and transportation access and their links to place-based variation in commuting and spatial...

KEY POINTS: • Visible minority immigrants are more than twice as likely as white immigrants to perceive discrimination when we control for gender, education and fluency in Canada's official languages. • For visible minority immigrants, fluency in English or French increases reports of discrimination in the workplace. • For white immigrants, fluency...

One of the most significant trends of the past three decades has been the rapid entry of women into the paid labor force. Women's growing labor force participation has affected all aspects of social and economic life, but especially transportation—the "glue" that connects women's economic and domestic spaces. This raises important questions about t...

KEY POINTS: • Immigrants that arrived earlier in Canada earn more regardless of their schooling. For each country of birth, the earnings gap is worst among recent immigrants. Immigrants from China, Pakistan and Iran are among the lowest earners, while immigrants from Guyana and Jamaica are among the highest earners. • With a few exceptions, the une...

KEY POINTS: • After 4 years in Canada, immigrant men and women planning to work in regulated occupations were more likely to have found employment related to their training or field of study than other immigrants (although such employment may not necessarily be in a regulated profession). • Gender and whether immigrants plan to work in regulated oc...