Immigrant Minorities and the Built Environment in New South Wales

How have minority immigrant communities transformed the built environment in NSW, Australia’s most populous and most cosmopolitan state? Sydney’s Chinatown over the past 100 years is the urban lens to explore issues such as the authenticity and legitimacy of the iconography of Chinatown’s dragons, lanterns and pagoda buildings and contradictory political processes that underly Chinatowns transformation today. Port Kembla, a steel town where many minority immigrants, particularly those from Macedonia, settled, provides regional city insights. Griffith is a rural town that has been transformed into a regional centre by Italian immigrant entrepreneurs who played a key role in developing the wine industry, opened restaurants and social clubs and built the Italian Museum. More recently, Sikhs continue the transformation of Griffith through the Gurdwara Singh Saba that opened in 1993 and the annual Sikh sports festival that they hold.