Having gone through this exercise for TOBuilt, and having commented on it on this site many times, I wish them luck. I did find the map they produced was wanting in a few respects, most notably in that there are blanks that are not covered by any neighbourhood definition. Almost every map I ever found that charted neighbourhoods did this - left out certain areas - and for my own purposes I need a map that covers the entire terrain of the city (since TOBuilt has structures that are not residential). Apart from that, a few observations, from things that I immediately check when I see maps of this type.
- I always look to see how North York Centre is handled. To my mind, there is indisputably a neighbourhood called "North York Centre" that is distinguishable from Willowdale, of which it was fomerly a part. This is really tricky, because NYC essentially forms the middle bit of Willowdale. But this map is rather bad at this - would anybody really claim that the former City Hall of North York is in Lansing, while Empress Walk, across the street, is in Willowdale?
- I also look to see how East York is handled, as it is also a difficult area for which to draw boundaries. True to form, there is a large swath of the former Borough (south of the river) that is simply "East York", while other parts of the former East York bear neighbourhood names. For TOBuilt, this did not work, and in East York more than most places, I "invented" some hoods, but they are defensible, I think mostly: Todmorden, Pape Village and East York Centre (this last one less defensible than others, given the East York City Centre up above the river, but what can you do?).
- A third difficult area is the centre of the city - if we have a "Financial District", do we also have a "Downtown"? What is University Avenue up near the hospitals, and what is the upper Bay Street Corridor where the Government buildings are? Are Burano and Mozo in the same neighbourhood or not? I essentially invented "Downtown East" to divide these into two, using Yonge Street as the border, and have "Downtown" as being that strip along Bay and University, north of Dundas, but it is an unsatisfying solution to a difficult problem. On this map, they've declined to name large swaths of this area at all.
- Finally, TOBuilt's neighbourhoods conformed to the old city boundaries, because I also index all buildings on their former city, and it would be confusing or too much work to have parts of Cedarvale in the former York, and parts in the former Toronto. This map doesn't respect the old city boundaries, but I think that's fine, and the old boundaries are likely to have less and less meaning over time anyways (above all on that confusing border between York and everyone else). In this regard, it's probably TOBuilt's own definitions that are a bit retrograde, but I don't plan on changing them much.
I could make a million other comments about individual details on the map - like whether Yorkville is correct or if it should be a larger "Bloor Yorkville" that bleeds to south of Bloor, but there are too many to observe and I am sympathetic to their effort and don't want to nitpick them to death.
Also, as the article points out, such definitions are constantly shifting in time. I wish we were more like Sydney, where neighbourhood boundaries are determined by some higher authority and set in stone, and consequently used rather consistently. It's the classifier and organizer of data in me that longs for a higher power, some absolute authority, to dictate this. If it were me, nothing in Toronto would be a "village" at all, and Liberty would be "Liberty". Controlled vocabularies, indeed.
