The strength and vitality of the many neighbourhoods that make up Toronto, Ontario, Canada has earned the city its unofficial nickname of "the city of neighbourhoods."[1] There are 158 neighbourhoods officially recognized by the City of Toronto (in 2022, 34 neighbourhoods were created from 16 of the previous 140)[2] and upwards of 240 official and unofficial neighbourhoods within city limits.[3]
The current City of Toronto is the amalgamation of the former Metropolitan Toronto municipalities. Along with the original City of Toronto, these are East York, Etobicoke, North York, Scarborough, and York. The names of these municipalities are still often used by Toronto residents, sometimes for disambiguation purposes as amalgamation resulted in duplicated street names. The area known as Toronto before the 1998 amalgamation is sometimes called the "Old Toronto", and "the core". For administrative purposes, Toronto is divided into four districts: Etobicoke-York, North York, Scarborough and Toronto-East York.
The Old Toronto district is, by far, the most populous and densest part of the city. It is also the business and administrative centre of the city. The uniquely Torontonian bay-and-gable housing style is common throughout the former city. The "inner ring" suburbs of York and East York are older, predominantly middle-income areas, and ethnically diverse. Much of the housing stock in these areas consists of pre-World War II single-family houses and some post-war high-rises. Many of the neighbourhoods in these areas were built up as streetcar suburbs and contain many dense and mixed-use streets, some of which are one-way. They share many characteristics with sections of the "old" city outside the downtown core. The "outer ring" suburbs of Etobicoke, Scarborough, and North York are much more suburban in nature, although even these districts have some old-city characteristics (in particular southern Etobicoke along the shore of Lake Ontario) in areas bordering Old Toronto, and have developed modern urban centres of their own, such as North York City Centre around Mel Lastman Square.
The following is a list of the more notable neighbourhoods, organized by former municipality.
- ^ "The Globe's Insider's City Guides: Toronto" John Allemang, Tralee Pearce. The Globe and Mail. Jun 11, 2003. pg. T.1
- ^ Toronto, City of (4 February 2024). "About Toronto Neighbourhoods". toronto.ca.
- ^ "City of Toronto Residential Communities and Business Improvement Areas Map" (PDF). toronto.ca. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-01-03. Retrieved 2009-05-21.