Toronto Visible Minorities

By: Jeff Clark    Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013

Toronto is the most multicultural city in the world. According to the 2011 National Household Survey, 46% of the population were foreign-born immigrants and 47% are members of a visible minority. (ref) These immigrants come from a wide variety of places across the globe and their diversity makes the city a truly remarkable place.

I have created a Dot Map that shows a single point for every person in the Toronto area, coloured by visible minority status. There are 5,700,628 in all and they are positioned at their place of residence and coloured based on the information from the 2011 census and National Household Survey. They do not depict actual individual locations but are based on the statistics over small areas.

This first image is zoomed in slightly and shows Toronto with only a few outlying areas. You can see regions of higher and lower population density as well as how the visible minorities are distributed across the city.



You can explore the map in detail with this Zoomable Dot Map of Toronto.

The section below is a close-up of the high-density string of condos along Yonge Street north of HWY 401. You can spot the blank rectangle of the cemetery to the left, the Don river valley, and commercial areas where no people reside.



The next image shows the white, predominantly Italian, area of Woodbridge with the South Asian concentration obvious to the west in Brampton.



This work was inspired by the previous creations of Eric Fischer, and Dustin Cable.

It was created with population data from Statistics Canada and map reference data from OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap data was taken from the very helpful Metro Extracts provided by Michal Migurski. The TileMill tool from MapBox was used to compose a map used to mask out non-residential areas and also the basemap underneath the dots. Custom code written with Processing was used to place the actual dots and create the final images. Thanks!

 


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