Rural vs Urban

It’s map classifies areas as “urban” if at least half of all households in the are live in buildings with five or more storeys. This definition is inspired by a comment by Stas Kolenikov on Mastodon. Stas post suggested a slightly different definition using the number of buildings instead of the number of units that we used here, our definition is partially motivated by data availability, and will classify more areas as “urban” than when counting buildings. As mentioned in the post, this is taking a European perspective to cities, recognizing larger European cities like Berlin, Paris, Athens, Vienna, Hamburg, Munich, Madrid, Barcelona, Moscow, to name a few, as being dominated by buildings at least five floors tall with shorter buildings on the periphery. Like most dichotomous metrics this one does not properly capture the gradual change in dwelling stock in cities, the map of dwelling types that classifies dwelling units into three typologies and shades each area by the proportional share of dwelling units may give a more accurate, albaight more complex, picture of the degree of urbanness in each region. Looking at Toronto we notice again that the simple city model, with the tallest building in the centre and building heights gradually decline as one moves further out is broken. The centre is still dominated by dwelling units in buildings with five or more stories, but instead of radially declining the pattern pf regions with at least a 50% share of such dwelling units is seemingly random. In Vancouver the pattern is.also spread our but a little less random, with in most cases areas with majority share of dwelling units in buildings with five or more storeys is in the designated urban centres. Calgary shows up with a single cluster of "urban" form in the centre, although little pockets of dwelling units in buildings with five or more storeys can be spotted when zooming in to view the map at a smaller geographic breakdown.

Author: CensusMapper Team

Dataset: CA21