Tag Archives: population

Edmonton’s population is up 12.1% according to the 2011 Federal Census

By Mack D. Male ·

Statistics Canada today released the first set of information for the 2011 Federal Census, focused on population and dwelling counts. The population of Canada has increased 5.9% since the 2006 census, compared with 5.4% for the previous five-year period.

Canada’s population increased at a faster rate than the population of any other member of the G8 group of industrialized nations between 2006 and 2011. This was also the case between 2001 and 2006.

Canada’s population now sits at 33,476,688. Looking at the provinces, Alberta leads the country in growth with an increase of 10.8%, taking our population up to 3,645,257, which is about 11% of the country.

Increasingly we are an urban country. A total of 69.1% of the population lives in one of Canada’s 33 census metropolitan areas (CMAs), and that number is going up:

The rate of growth between 2006 and 2011 was 7.4% in CMAs as a group, above the national average of 5.9%. The two fastest growing CMAs were both in Alberta: Calgary, where the population rose 12.6%, and Edmonton, where it increased 12.1%.

Here’s a look at the fastest growing CMAs in the country:

Looking at federal electoral districts in the Edmonton region, Edmonton-Leduc was the fastest growing with 28% growth since 2006 census, followed by Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont at 22%.

Looking at Edmonton more generally, the population of the city now sits at 812,201 while the population of the CMA is now 1,159,869. Here’s the population for the City and the CMA over the last fifteen years:

And here’s the percentage increase over that same time period:

Edmonton is now the sixth largest CMA in the country, and we’re growing more quickly than anticipated.

We’ll have to wait until May 29 to learn more about the age and gender breakdown, September 19 to learn more about households, marital status, and structure types, and October 24 to learn more about language.

The City of Edmonton is conducting another municipal census in April this year, and is looking for 1400 people to act as census workers. You can apply in person at City Hall. You can learn more about the municipal census here.

You can learn more about the 2011 Federal Census here, and also check out The Daily for today.

What’s the population of Edmonton’s downtown? Depends on the time of day.

By Mack D. Male ·

Revitalizing our downtown is constantly in the news lately thanks to the proposed arena project. I’m glad that the issue is top-of-mind for so many people at the moment, and I hope we can keep that interest going. I think everyone agrees that Edmonton’s downtown does not currently represent our city as well as it should.

There are lots of factors that go into revitalizing an area. Probably even more that go into revitalizing a downtown. But there’s one factor in particular that for me stands out above all others. Residents.

I think if you really want to revitalize an area, you need to get more people living there. We’ve already seen this play out in Edmonton to a certain extent. Here’s what our downtown population growth has looked like since 1986:

Keep in mind the population has really only slightly more than doubled in that time. Not what you would call really significant growth. And yet look at all of the positive changes we have seen downtown in that time! This article by Lawrence Herzog from 2003 covers some of the changes up to that point quite nicely. People regularly point to 104 Street as a positive example of change downtown. It’s why Sharon and I bought here.

The factor that most often comes up as vital to revitalization however, is the number of people working downtown. Sometimes the argument made is quite compelling too. Whenever I hear that argument, I think of this graph:

It’s incredible how widely the population varies from the weekend to a weekday. And this doesn’t even take into account students and all of the other groups of people that might be downtown on a weekday. Is our downtown population 12,000 or 68,000? It absolutely depends on the time of day!

Why does nearly everything downtown close so early on weekdays? Why is almost nothing open downtown on Sundays? Why isn’t downtown changing as fast as we’d like it to? I think that graph tells a very significant part of the story (see below for an explanation and sources).

The numbers are certainly not encouraging:

  • As of 2009, downtown Edmonton’s population was 11,572. That’s just 1.5% of our total population.
  • As of 2010, downtown Edmonton’s workforce was roughly 67,700. That’s just over 10% of our total labour force.
  • Current plans call for the addition of just 12,200 new residents residential units over the next 35 years, and an increase in residents to 24,000 by 2030. We more than doubled the population in 23 years, why are we slowing down for the next 35 years? That’s about the same pace as we have seen over the last 20 years.
  • According to the Downtown Business Association’s most recent employee survey (PDF), just 6% of people who work downtown also live downtown. This despite downtown being one of our two biggest employment centres (the other being the University of Alberta, which is just a short LRT ride away).

So I don’t buy the argument that we need more people working downtown. If anything, we need more of the people who work downtown to choose to live there also. We need to want to make the changes downtown needs, and we need to make decisions that support that. If we want to meaningfully revitalize downtown, this picture has to change!

There’s a lot more to this discussion of course, but I find this to be a useful way to remind myself of the importance of residents. What do you think?

Sources: Municipal Census 2009, 2010 Downtown Resident Survey (PDF), 2010 Downtown Employee Survey (PDF), 2010 Business Recruitment Resource (PDF). The surveys come from the Downtown Business Association, and I used them to calculate the numbers in the graph. The times, 6am to 7pm, come from the Employee Survey. On weekdays, the green portion is essentially the number of people who both live and work downtown, which is an average of the 6% of employees who say they live downtown and the 29% of residents who say they work downtown. There are a bunch of assumptions made, of course, such as the assumption that if you’re a downtown resident and you don’t work downtown, you work and are somewhere else between 6am and 7pm.

Edmonton Neighbourhood Census Data

By Mack D. Male ·

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.