Edited to include proportional city dots. I hope this improves the quiz! I plan to update all 100 Cities on the Map Quizzes in this style, so stay tuned! Also fixed the position of a couple cities in Southern Ontario.
Nice! How do you make these maps? Do you put the dots manually or do you convert them from lat/long? I thought of a variation where dots of large cities are shown at the start but as you guess them the dots of smaller cities are revealed
Thanks! I put the dots on manually, and then un-fill them. That's a good idea actually, and you are free to use any of my maps to make that! I cannot do anything much myself since I do each process by hand, just filling in the data takes ages...
Thanks a lot! I just submitted a variation of your 100 Italian cities quiz... I used that one as, being featured, I could quickly copy the quiz and check the 'name' of each dot corresponding to each city. I also added some type-ins. Thanks again!!
The quiz uses metro population, meaning that cities connected to larger ones such as Vaughan and Brampton are considered a part of Toronto. Milton and Kanata are only seperated from Toronto and Ottawa (respectively) because they have fields between them and their parent city, despite being suburbs.
That's a bizarrely arbitrary rule, and you didn't even mention it in the caveats. It didn't occur to me to try Kanata because it's part of the City of Ottawa. Not even the Ottawa CMA, but part of the city proper! It was amalgamated. By including the community of Kanata, the people of Kanata are counted twice in this quiz. And if you're going to list Kanata because of its separation from the rest of the city by the Greenbelt, then you should also add Orleans, Barrhaven, and Stittsville.
The city of Airdrie is being counted twice since it's part of the Calgary CMA but, unlike Kanata, it is actually a city. Likewise, Milton is counted twice, since it's part of the Toronto CMA. White Rock is in Metro Vancouver. Spruce Grove is in Metro Edmonton. Georgetown is not a city, having been amalgamated into the town of Halton Hills which, in turn, is in Metro Toronto. Quispamsis-Rothesay is not a census agglomeration, and I can't find any reference to those two cities being officially combined.
Also, you're listing the population for just the city of Ottawa, but not including Gatineau as a separate city. Yes, Gatineau is part of the Ottawa-Gatineau population centre, but if you're including it as part of Ottawa, then Ottawa's population should be 1.32 m. Things get messy when you include or exclude cities or communities in your definition of population centres, but don't adjust their populations to match those definitions.
Kanata is not counted in the figures for Ottawa in this quiz, as all populations are consistent as per Statistics Canada. Ottawa's population here does include Gatineau, but since so much of Ottawa Proper is rural/disconnected from the city core then Ottawa looses a lot of her population at the same time. I will include the source in the caveats, though, thanks!
I will continue to use population-centres in future because it goes hand-in-hand with what I'd consider a city's limit. However I will also consider greying out controversial cities like Kanata or maybe even White Rock (depending how I'm feeling). When you get further down the list you have to contend with even more oddities but overall the list is pretty clean for the top 200 or so population-centres.
Stats Canada's list doesn't make any sense. They list Kanata but not Orleans (116,688). Have you ever driven to Orleans on the Queensway? The "rural gap" (Green Belt) between Gloucester and Orleans is WAY bigger than the gap between Bells Corners and Kanata. If Kanata is a population center, Orleans is a population center.
It's impossible that they're only coming up with 989,567 for Ottawa-Gatineau without removing Orleans, Barrhaven, and Stittsville, and yet they aren't listed separately. Whatever arbitrary rules they used for their definition need to be re-evaluated. This list is so laughably awful, it's not worth using.
If it is so awful, I suggest you have a word with Statistics Canada then. Here is what the borders of Ottawa are according to them, and here is the list in full. It's either this or I use city-proper population, and half of the cities here will be suburbs on Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Otherwise, I can use metro figures which groups massive, county-sized areas together. Neither option is particularly attractive.
Personally, I like the way this quiz is done. Yes, there are some oddities in it, but it follows a specific organization's definitions - Stats Canada - so there's no grey areas really, and it's nice that smaller places are included, rather than the list being entirely suburbs, which is really boring.
@CaoMaru I appreciate this comment, I have the same opinions about suburbs too.
I apologise to anyone if I come off as defensive here, it's just there are only three different ways to measure city populations in Canada and so I am forced to make decisions. I am passionate enough that I could go and create my own list, but it would take more time than I currently have and could (at least theoretically) be subject to more scrutiny than I could ever defend.
I should specify that these are population centres, rather than true metro areas. The Canadian government will divide metro areas when there is rural area inbetween the suburb and the city proper. In the case of White Rock it is seperated from Vancouver by fields.
South Surrey is included in with White Rock, while the majority of the rest of Surrey is attatched to Vancouver's urban sprawl and thus included in Vancouver's total population. See here for more details. Population-centre data isn't perfect but it's probably the best method we have of comparing Canadian cities!
If you should specify it, then you should specify it in the caveats, not the comments. Better yet, just don't do it. Use the official definitions for Census Metropolitan Areas and Census Agglomerations to avoid having to justify your decisions about what constitutes a "population centre". If you're going to use metro population, as you claim in the caveats, then keep it simple and uncontroversial by using this list.
I don't like the Metropolitan Figures, they are far too encompassing for my likes. For example, my city Lethbridge is ballooned to the population of Lethbridge County (majority of which is rural). I find it far more arbitrary than Population-centres, even if that measurement has its flaws too (the most obvious of which being the inclusion of Kanata, in my opinion).
This is a really awesome quiz and deserves more recognition. The details of the different provinces and how you listed the number of cities in each province really brings everything together!
I am really curious though, how did you make this quiz to only include Canada, separate the Canadian provinces AND how you not only included the US, but also it's separate states?
Why does Kanata count but not Gatineau? As someone from Ottawa, Kanata is basically just another part of the city, while Gatineau is a different city. Does the metro area count or not?
It is population-centre figures, so it's somewhere inbetween city proper and metro. As you probably guessed, Gatineau is absorbed into Ottawa. I 100% agree with you though that Kanata should be included in Ottawa's population figures (in fact I'm really tempted to grey that one out and go to 101 instead).
It is the price to pay for using population-centre figures, however, and I have much less issues with this measurement than I do with city-proper or metro area :)
Statistics Canada calculates for different urban measurements at the same time: city proper population, population-centre (which includes all settlements within a built-up urban area regardless of administrative borders) and metro-areas/agglomerations (which includes surrounding administrative divisions, meaning the exact size of the agglomeration depends on the borders of the administrative units themselves).
For this quiz I used population-centre metrics, which actually has the smallest population figure for Whitehorse of any metric, as Whitehorse has large city-limits which encompass surrounding populated rural areas. On the other hand, Whitehorse's agglomeration is even larger, and stretches all the way to the BC border.
The city of Airdrie is being counted twice since it's part of the Calgary CMA but, unlike Kanata, it is actually a city. Likewise, Milton is counted twice, since it's part of the Toronto CMA. White Rock is in Metro Vancouver. Spruce Grove is in Metro Edmonton. Georgetown is not a city, having been amalgamated into the town of Halton Hills which, in turn, is in Metro Toronto. Quispamsis-Rothesay is not a census agglomeration, and I can't find any reference to those two cities being officially combined.
It's impossible that they're only coming up with 989,567 for Ottawa-Gatineau without removing Orleans, Barrhaven, and Stittsville, and yet they aren't listed separately. Whatever arbitrary rules they used for their definition need to be re-evaluated. This list is so laughably awful, it's not worth using.
I apologise to anyone if I come off as defensive here, it's just there are only three different ways to measure city populations in Canada and so I am forced to make decisions. I am passionate enough that I could go and create my own list, but it would take more time than I currently have and could (at least theoretically) be subject to more scrutiny than I could ever defend.
I am really curious though, how did you make this quiz to only include Canada, separate the Canadian provinces AND how you not only included the US, but also it's separate states?
Actually, the original map comes from this Jetpunk quiz but I modified the map, as I saw fit.
It is the price to pay for using population-centre figures, however, and I have much less issues with this measurement than I do with city-proper or metro area :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma,_Quebec
For this quiz I used population-centre metrics, which actually has the smallest population figure for Whitehorse of any metric, as Whitehorse has large city-limits which encompass surrounding populated rural areas. On the other hand, Whitehorse's agglomeration is even larger, and stretches all the way to the BC border.
It's a good question though.