As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about infill housing and overall urban densities, let’s look at some basic math.
The City of Toronto has an estimated population of 3,025,647 (as of June 2023) and a land area of 630 square meters. That means that its average population density is about 4,803 people per km2. Obviously this number will be higher in some locations, and lower in others. But overall, this is the average.
Now let’s consider how many people we could actually fit within the existing boundaries of the city (city proper not the metro area) if we were to simply match the average population densities of some other global cities around the world.
Again, what this chart is saying is that if we took the same physical area (Toronto’s 630 square meters) and just increased the population density to that of, say, Paris, we would then have a total population of over 13 million people and we’d be housing an additional 10,011,573 humans on the same footprint.
I am not suggesting that this is exactly what should be done. (Though, you all know how much I love Paris.) What I’m suggesting is that calling a place “full” isn’t exactly accurate. How would you even measure that? What someone is really saying is that they are content with the status quo in terms of built form and density.
Note: The above population densities were all taken from Wikipedia, except for Toronto’s figures, which were taken from here.
BRANDON DONNELLY 
I was surprised you did not use LA which has the most deceptive density of all it seems to me. It is (if I did the math right) 130% denser than NYC yet most see it to be a low-density suburban type of place. Yes I feel the same about Paris as you do.
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I agree with your central point, which is that Toronto has the room available to become much denser. However, I’ve also always felt the measuring “density” in cities is quite complex and easy to get wrong. Just one of the rows in your table, for instance, Buenos Aires is not really so much denser than Toronto as the data would suggest, because the actual city of Buenos Aires is quite small, one third the size of Toronto’s city boundaries, and the comparison is unequal. Wikipedia notes an “urban area” density of 4862 people for BA, which is probably a more comparable figure to Toronto’s density. But it’s always a fraught comparison because it depends on defining the boundaries of an urban area, which gets more and more difficult the larger they get. Even Paris’s urban area density is 3877.
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I agree with you on measuring density. It’s not always apples to apples. But Paris is certainly more dense than Toronto on average.
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