Overview

The Montreal Census Metropolitan Area encompasses 113 municipalities and jurisdictions a geographical area of 4,074 square kilometres. The total population is 3,326,510 persons living in 1,350,677 private dwellings running from single family detached units to multi-storey apartment towers.

Visualization of Montreal for this project occurs at the Census Tract level using data from 769 individual CTs. Some holes exist in the census data where information was not available. These are visualized as blank spaces.

A Census Tract (CT) is a small, geographically restricted area with a population of between 2,500 and 8,000 people. Census Tracts are found within Census Agglomeration areas with populations greater than 50,000 people. A CT is not restricted in size, and can encompass quite a large geographic extent.

A Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) is generally formed by one or more adjacent municipalities forming a central urban area, or an urban core. The urban coremust have a population greater than 100,000 and a population density of at least 400 persons per square kilometre.

The extent of the CMA is determined by the level of integration between adjacent municipalities and and the urban core. In the Montreal example, the urban core consists of the former City (now arrondissement) of Montreal, Westmount, Outremont and the rest of the cities on the Island of Montreal. Laval and Longueil can be classified as urban fringe, not directly connected to the urban core by heavily integrated. Outlying areas such as Oka or Mirabel are classified as rural fringe but are still heavily integrated with the Montreal region.

The level of integration is determined by Statistics Canada based on journey-to-work information collected within the census questionnaire. As this information is collected at an individual level and could potentially be traced back to the source, it unfortunately cannot be used at anything less than an aggregate level as it is kept strictly confidential.

Fortunately, municipal planning agencies frequently conduct their own transportation surveys to determine commuting and mobility patterns of the residents within their service area. This data can be used to more precisely determine the individual travel characteristics and demands of an urban population. This will be explored in Phase 2 of this project.

The Montreal CMA

Census Subdivisions