Dr. David L. A. Gordon leads a research project at Queen's University that is focused on determining the proportion of the Canadian population that lives in a suburb. Why this is interesting is because the data isn't normally looked at in this way. As I understand it, the way Statistics Canada thinks about things is that you're either rural or you're urban, living in a major population center.

But this isn't exactly right. Obviously there's a difference between living in a dense transit-oriented community and living in a car-centric one. The former is actually "urban" and the latter is not.

So what the research team set out to do was more accurately classify Canadian cities. And after doing that, they ended up with four categories within each census metropolitan area: (1) active core, (2) transit suburb, (3) auto suburb, and (4) exurban. See above example. What they then discovered is that about 66% of Canadians live in a suburb. And in our largest cities -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver -- the figure is over 80%.

Canada is often referred to as one of the most urbanized nations in the world. But as we can see here, that's not exactly true. Canada is more accurately a suburban nation.

Image: Canadian Suburbs

Dr. David L. A. Gordon leads a research project at Queen's University that is focused on determining the proportion of the Canadian population that lives in a suburb. Why this is interesting is because the data isn't normally looked at in this way. As I understand it, the way Statistics Canada thinks about things is that you're either rural or you're urban, living in a major population center.

But this isn't exactly right. Obviously there's a difference between living in a dense transit-oriented community and living in a car-centric one. The former is actually "urban" and the latter is not.

So what the research team set out to do was more accurately classify Canadian cities. And after doing that, they ended up with four categories within each census metropolitan area: (1) active core, (2) transit suburb, (3) auto suburb, and (4) exurban. See above example. What they then discovered is that about 66% of Canadians live in a suburb. And in our largest cities -- Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver -- the figure is over 80%.

Canada is often referred to as one of the most urbanized nations in the world. But as we can see here, that's not exactly true. Canada is more accurately a suburban nation.

Image: Canadian Suburbs