Every Building in Toronto

MapTO has mapped Every Building in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. The map provides an interesting insight into historical land use and planning trends in the Greater Toronto area.

The MapTO building footprint map includes a guided tour of some of the most interesting patterns which can be found in Toronto's urban landscape. If you use the forward and back buttons the map will zoom to different locations in the GTHA. The map information window updates as you progress through the tour, explaining some of the historical development trends in the GTHA area.

MapTO's map was inspired by the New York Times' popular Map of Every Building in America. The NYT map used Microsoft's US Building Footprints open data to create an interactive map of every building in the USA. The Microsoft data set includes the building footprint polygons of 125,192,184 buildings in the USA.


If you color Toronto's building footprints by the year of construction you could create a Toronto building age map. Alternatively you could color the building footprints by their height. For example, Jonathan Critchley has used data from City of Toronto Open Data to map the height of Toronto's buildings.

The City of Toronto Building Height map colors building footprints by the height of each building. If you hover over individual buildings on the map you can view the selected building's height in meters and whether the building is zoned as residential, commercial or for some other purpose.