Categories
GIS

Finding the exact geographic centre of Toronto

Spacing has alluded to it. The Ontario Science Centre makes bold (and incorrect) claims about it. But here’s the real deal.

  • If you consider Toronto to be defined by its city wards, the centre of Toronto lies at 43.725518°N, 79.390531°W.
  • If you consider Toronto to be defined by its neighbourhoods, the centre of Toronto lies at 43.726495°N, 79.390641°W.

You can work this out in one line of SQL. By combining all the wards or neighbourhoods into one union shape (SpatiaLite uses the GUnion() function), and then calculating the centroid, that’s the centre of the city:

select astext(transform(centroid(gunion(geometry)),4326)) from wards

To get the results in a more human-friendly format, I transformed it to WGS84 (EPSG SRID 4326), and used astext() to get it in something other than binary.

Update, 18 March: great minds, etc … Torontoist just posted the similar In Search of Toronto’s Geographic Centre.