SPACE - Mapping of Black Toronto

This interactive map created using CARTO shows a different geography and history of the City of Toronto (Tkaronto). I mapped significant spaces and places connected to the Black lived experience, both past and present. Specific GIS data comes from the City of Toronto Open Data Catalogue.

Sites of interest are categorized by type: Grocery, Nightclub, Restaurant, Bar, Church, Beauty, Bakery, Community, and more. When you click a point on the map, you can see the name, address, category, and date that this place existed in the archives. These spaces and places of Blackness are collected from libraries, public archives, conversations, newspapers, magazines, social media, and public/collective memory.

If you would like to see images from this on-going digital archive, click here and here.

Below the map, there is a timeline that traces the dates that Black Toronto spaces/places existed. Please play and pause this feature to see the changes over time. If you would like to see the sites of the interest in a particular part of the city, zoom in, zoom out, and scroll. The former six municipalities of Toronto are color coded (Toronto, York, East York, North York, Etobicoke, Scarborough). When you zoom in to a location, the map's data changes.

On the right side, you can "Places by Area", which calculates the sites of interest by number and sorts them by color/category. The timeline also changes, and shows only the existence of these sites on the screen.