Potential of Geographic Information Systems for Refugee Crisis: Syrian Refugee Relocation in Urban Habitats

Spatial decision support systems have become ubiquitous tools in planning and understanding regional dynamics. With the present challenges faced throughout the world, Canada is becoming an increasingly important benchmark for migrants of different nations to start safe and productive lives. With the latest group currently entering the country are refugees being brought in primarily from Syria, in larger numbers than Canada has seen in decades. Because of this, the government has had to rapidly implement plans to allocate this influx to available places around the country. Because of the particular status of these immigrant's particular attention must be given to address complex social and economic interactions that guarantee opportunity and growth for refugees as well as functional socio-economic habitats within metropolitan regions. This paper adopts a spatially-explicit approach using a key set of socio-economic variables to understand micro-spatial location optima for refugees to begin their lives in Toronto. By intertwining key variables such as accessibility to employment, English language classes, people of similar cultures or situations, proximity to food/clothing/healthcare, a combinatory metric is designed to assess the most adequate liveability within the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area. The micro-spatial models propose an integrative vision of weighted measures to assess the spatial perspective brought by Geographic Information Systems. It is concluded that suburban regions around major cities hold a significant potential for refugee habitats, suggesting the integration of regional intelligence paradigms in the spatial planning and regional decision support systems of governmental and policy interaction.