« Notes for 4/5/2010 | Home | Edmonton Public Schools & Open Data »
Edmonton Neighbourhood Census Data
For a long time I’ve wanted to get the City of Edmonton’s neighbourhood census data in CSV format (or really any usable format other than PDF). Recently, with the help of Laura (and Sandra) at the City’s Election & Census Services department, who I met at the Open City Workshop, I finally got it. And now you can have it too!
Download the Edmonton Neighbourhood Census Data in CSV
I’ve also emailed this to the City’s open data team, so hopefully they can get it in the data catalogue soon.
Visualizing the Data
Why is having the census data in a format like CSV useful? Well for one thing, it enables creatives to do stuff with that data through code or other tools. For instance, I was able to generate a heat map for the City of Edmonton:
The darker sections are more heavily populated, the lighter yellow regions are less populated.
Not all neighbourhoods are reflected, as the City does not release details for neighbourhoods with a population between 1 and 49. Here are some other things we can learn from the data set:
- Total population in the data set is 777,811, which means there are 4628 individuals unaccounted for (total for 2009 was 782,439).
- The average neighbourhood population is 2424, or 3039 if you exclude neighbourhoods with a reported population of 0.
- The median neighbourhood population is 2216.
- Oliver and Downtown are the only two neighbourhoods with a population greater than 10,000.
- More dwellings are owned (192,171) than rented (121,953).
ShareEdmonton
Another reason having this data in CSV is useful is because app developers can more easily integrate it into the things they are building. For example, all the census data is now available at ShareEdmonton! So when you view a neighbourhood, you’ll see the census data on the right side (see Alberta Avenue for example). You can also browse neighbourhoods by population. I’ve also fixed the neighbourhood search, so it works better now.
This is just the first of a few neighbourhood-related updates this month, so stay tuned for more!
Apps4Edmonton
Yesterday the City released more information on the Apps4Edmonton competition. The first phase, from now until May, is “accepting community ideas”. Basically they want you to tell them what data you want. Aside from the obvious “we don’t know what we don’t know” problem, I think the community has done a pretty good job of defining desired data sets already.
They City had a great start in January with the launch of the data catalogue, but we need more data. Especially data like the census data, which myself and many others have been asking for since the day the PDFs were released. There are clearly some internal issues that need to be worked out if I was able to acquire this before the open data team was. I hope they get everything resolved for the competition, because it’ll be a pretty boring one if we still only have twelve data sets (New York and other cities had dozens, maybe even hundreds, before their competitions).
That said, I know there are passionate, smart people working on it. Email opendata@edmonton.ca if you have data set requests or want to get involved in Apps4Edmonton.
Tweet
Tags: apps4edmonton, census, community, data, edmonton, neighbourhoods, open data, population, ShareEdmonton, statistics, yegdata
Categories: ShareEdmonton | 21 Comments »
April 7th, 2010 at 11:34 am
This is cool beans!
Ever since I saw the map of the planned school closures I had been wondering about population density in those areas.
For comparison-
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/2662505/story.html
Keep up the good work.
April 7th, 2010 at 11:35 am
Funny you should comment on that…I have a post on schools in relation to the census data in the works! Thanks!
April 7th, 2010 at 11:39 am
Thank you for this, it is very interesting!
April 7th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Very cool Mack!
Where did you get the community boundaries which overlay your Google Maps on ShareEdmonton?
April 7th, 2010 at 1:03 pm
I acquired them a while ago, and I hope that they too will be available in the data catalogue before long. I can email you more details Sean.
April 7th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
That’d be great, thanks
April 7th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Is this Google Map viewable somewhere?
April 7th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Joel – Not currently. It takes quite a while to download and render that many polygons on a single page. I’m going to try to improve it, and will update if I get an interactive version online soon.
April 7th, 2010 at 6:56 pm
My first thought was along the same line as Margaret’s.
Between the suburbs and the core, there is a low-density ring that matches most of the area where the EPSB is currently conducting sector reviews.
How do we get city hall and the school board to cooperate on a plan to create infill that would attract more families to these communities — saving taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in new school construction costs?
We’ve thought of densification so far as bachelor suites in adult-only condominium towers. That doesn’t help schools which may be underpopulated. As values shift away from big homes on big lots, there is an opportunity to create green living for young families in established communities. Vancouver has done that very effectively, even opening new schools downtown to keep up with demand, but trustees and councillors in Edmonton prefer to blame each other as the source of the problem instead of working together to find solutions.
Thanks for the map, Mack. Perhaps an elected official with a vision for a better future will look at the information and make the obvious connections.
April 8th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Mack, very cool. How hard would it be to create a map of population density based on neighbourhood area?
April 8th, 2010 at 11:31 am
Thanks Christopher. If you have other ideas on how I can help, let me know!
Matthew – not hard, I have it in Excel, I’ll try to generate a map soon. Thanks!
April 8th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Awesome Mack! Thanks!!
April 8th, 2010 at 4:27 pm
Is this a population map or a density map? It seems to be a population map. The darker areas seem to be in the neighbourhoods that cover a larger area.
What would be interesting would be to convert this to a density map (people/sq km in each neighbourhood) and see how it changes.
April 8th, 2010 at 4:32 pm
It’s a population map, not a density map. As I said to Matthew, I will work on a density map next.
The two most populated neighbourhoods are Oliver and Downtown, which have areas of 1.71 km² and 2.28 km², respectively. The average neighbourhood area is 1.94 km².
April 9th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I guess doing a density map would be quite a challenge. I mean, how do you calculate it for downtown? Sure, downtown is 2.28km2, but most of it might be commercial space. The population is highly concentrated in certain areas, but over the entire area it might be as dense as a newer subdivision full of condos and townhouses.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:14 am
That’s true, I can do it for the neighbourhood level, but you’re right, it won’t differentiate between residential/commercial space within the neighbourhood.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Do we have zoning in SHP file from the City? If so, I could do a density map based on residential zones for each neighbourhood in ArcGIS.
April 12th, 2010 at 12:58 pm
Hello!
I’m working on a project that lends itself well to walking tours (and is googlemap friendly), and I would love to be able to organize business locations and such into neighborhoods. You mentioned above that there was a way to access this data on Edmonton’s neighborhood borders, can you share this method?
April 25th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
[...] [...]
May 25th, 2010 at 6:55 pm
[...] Public Schools, Edmonton Catholic Schools. You’ll also need the neighbourhood census data, which is available here (should be in the catalogue [...]
June 22nd, 2010 at 11:46 am
[...] trying to persuade them that one of the reasons Oliver is such a nice place to live is that it is the densest neighbourhood in the city. Density means that this district has the population to support lots of small shops, restaurants, [...]