Toronto’s existing 140 social planning neighbourhoods have been in existence since the late 1990s. However, in recent years population growth has made each neighbourhood’s population unbalanced in relation to the others. To balance population growth, the Social Research & Information Management unit (SRIM), together with partners in other City divisions and public agencies, developed neighbourhood splits that resulted in 34 new neighbourhood areas with more balanced populations. For more information please see the What are the Changes to the Neighbourhoods accordion below. If you are a member of the media, please reach out to media@toronto.ca.
The map below shows the City of Toronto’s 140 social planning neighbourhoods displayed by neighbourhood number, and will be updated to 158 neighbourhoods shortly. Click the map to bring up the profile of your neighbourhood or use the lookup features below the map to find your neighbourhood profile. These profiles provide detailed demographic information about each neighbourhood, prepared by the City’s Social Policy Analysis & Research Unit from Statistics Canada Census data (updated every 5 years). You can download the complete 2016 Neighbourhood Profiles data set in one file from the City’s Open Data Portal.
New Neighbourhood Facts:
If you are a member of the media, please reach out to media@toronto.ca. If you are a user of the 140 neighbourhoods, have more questions or would like a more detailed description of the methodology or shapefiles, please contact spar@toronto.ca.
The neighbourhood profiles were developed to help government and community agencies with their local planning, by providing socio-economic data at a meaningful geographic area. Unlike other geographies like wards or dissemination blocks, the boundaries of these social planning neighbourhoods change very infrequently over time, allowing researchers to perform longitudinal studies see the changes in each area. Not all people define neighbourhoods the same way, but for the purposes of statistical reporting these neighbourhoods were defined based on Statistics Canada census tracts.
Not all people define neighbourhoods the same way. The 140 neighbourhoods used by the City of Toronto were developed to help government and community organizations with their local planning by providing socio-economic data at a meaningful geographic area. The boundaries of these social planning neighbourhoods do not change over time, allowing researchers to examine changes over time.
In order to ensure high quality social data, the neighbourhoods were defined based on Statistics Canada Census Tract boundaries. Census Tracts include several city blocks and have on average about 4,000 people. Neighbourhoods are comprised of from 2 to 5 Census Tracts.
Like Census Tracts, most service agencies and their programs have service areas that are defined by main streets, former municipal boundaries, or natural boundaries such as rivers. These service areas include several census tracts. It is not uncommon for service areas of community agencies to overlap. Choices about neighbourhood boundaries were made to make the data in the profiles useful to as many users as possible, and are not intended to be statements or judgments about where a neighbourhood starts or ends.
The boundaries for these neighbourhoods were developed using the following criteria:
The 2016 Neighbourhood Profiles are based on data collected by Statistics Canada in its 2016 Census of Population. Data is gathered from the Census Profile as well as a number of other tables, including Core Housing Need, living arrangements and income sources. Some of the data was retrieved directly from Statistics Canada and some tables were accessed via the Community Data Program.
Not all of the data retrieved is presented in the profiles. Users wishing to access the full neighbourhoods 2016 Census data set should download the data from the Open Data portal: www.toronto.ca/open. Search the catalogue for “neighbourhood” to find the Neighbourhood Profiles data set and many more sources of neighbourhood-level data.
Neighbourhood-level 2016 Census data is also available via the Wellbeing online mapping application, available at: www.toronto.ca/wellbeing.
Source: Statistics Canada, Census of Population, 2016. Reproduced and distributed on an “as is” basis with the permission of Statistics Canada under its Open Licence agreement.
Note: Neighbourhood profiles use data adapted by City of Toronto from Statistics Canada, Census of Population, 2016. This does not constitute an endorsement by Statistics Canada of this product.
The City of Toronto strives to make its information products available in accessible formats. Some accessibility features have been incorporated into the 2016 version of this product, including:
We welcome your feedback on how we can continue to make these products more accessible. Please contact us at spar@toronto.ca with your feedback.
