Amirreza Farshchin

PhD student in Geography at the University of Ottawa

Amirreza Farshchin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Geomatics at the University of Ottawa. He holds a bachelor's degree in urban planning and design from the University of Tehran and a master's in urban and regional planning from Tarbiat Modares University. Amirreza’s master’s thesis focused on infill development, a type of urban development that promotes sustainability by avoiding urban sprawl. Before embarking on his academic career in Canada, he worked for 10 years as a researcher at the Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR). At ACECR, Amirreza worked on a wide range of research areas related to urban planning, from urban resilience to urban livability. Currently, he is a research assistant in the BMRC/IMRU project under the supervision of Dr. Brian Ray.

Amirreza’s dissertation focuses on the experience of immigrants in the urban labour market, with a particular focus on large Canadian cities. He aims to examine the differences that these cities make in terms of the performance of immigrants over time. Each immigrant-receiving city in Canada has unique characteristics, including its historically rooted identity, settlement situation, institutions, and social and economic systems, which attract particular groups of immigrants. Each of these immigrant communities, with different sets of skills and preferences, has also created distinct industrial and employment structures in the local labour market over time. This makes each city unique in terms of social and economic dynamics that provide immigrants with different opportunities and functions in terms of economic integration. The contribution that immigrants have in these urban economies becomes more complex when we consider immigrants not as a homogenous group but as a very heterogeneous one in terms of the time of arrival, where they were born, gender, education, and the way that the intersection of these attributes in an immigrant is interpreted in the Canadian context.