Percentage of urban areas in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver CMAs

Question

I have been asked if I could provide the percentage of urban areas (in square km) for the Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto CMAs. My understanding is that this would translate, in terms of the 2011 Census geography, in the area covered by Population Centres within those CMAs.

I’m not sure if those numbers are readily available, but I thought I could calculate them using GeoSuite 2011 by:

• Generating a list of POPCTR areas for each CMA, making sure to exclude any rural area (POPCTRRAclass = 1)
• Adding up the values of the POPCTRRAarea field for all population centres
• Dividing that result by the area of the CMA

Can someone confirm that is an accurate method for calculating the % of the area covered by urban/population centres within a CMA?

Answer

GEO has provided the following response:

“We talked with subject matter on this. The methodology presented by the client is reasonable. The two things to remember are:

• PopCentres do not overlap CMA boundaries
• There may be multiple PopCentres of different types (Primary, Secondary, Fringe) within a CMA

So, removing the Rural Area PopCentres and calculating land areas with the remaining seems to be a valid methodology.”

Urban/ Rural?

Question

I've got a researcher who wants to know how to determine what's urban, what's rural within the Gr. Sudbury CMA. Is this possible? The census geography is, well, rather complex!

Answer


I am forwarding an off-list reply to your question to the dlilist as I am sure that others will be interested in the suggestions.

If you run the Geosuite 2006 application, and go to chart search, select 'CMA/CA and non CMA/CA' box and
select 'Sudbury' from the resulting list, then click on the 'UA/RA' box you will get a listing of the communities (CSDs, sort of) that make up Greater Sudbury. The UARA type tells you whether each is urban, rural, etc. If you then want to get a list of the blocks that make up each one.

Another alternative is to use the PCCF. At: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/cc06/fsa_sep08.csv

I have a list of FSAs and the CMAs (SAC codes) that each belongs to, extracted from the PCCF. If an FSA has a '0' as the second digit, eg 'P0M' then Canada Post considers it rural. If you sort the file in excel, the list of FSAs will indicate which CSDs in Greater Sudbury are urban and which are rural.

I also have a file at: http://prod.library.utoronto.ca:8090/datalib/codebooks/cstdli/pccf/pccf_08sep/postcode_by_ct_08sep.csv.Z

which shows CMA/CA code and census tracts names for each postal code. Find the Sudbury cts, and again the postal code FSA will tell you if its rural or urban.

Yet another option is to use the full PCCF, which you should be able to access at: http://dc1.chass.utoronto.ca/census/pccf.html and do the same thing at the postal code level.

Yet another option, which I find easier than the Geosuite product, is the to use the Geography attribute file for the 2006 census. This will give you Stats Can's rural/urban classification, rather than Canada Posts. The UAtype variable in that will do the same thing as Geosuite, in a less cumbersome manner. You will find the user guide, and a set of SPSS syntax at: http://chass.utoronto.ca/datalib/cc06/georef06.htm#gaf