The Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF) — the lead program at the Daniels Faculty's Global Cities Institute — recently released the report, “Data, Boundaries, Competitiveness: The Toronto Urban Region in Global Context." The Report highlights the need to aggregate municipal data on globally standardized metrics in order to build knowledge of urban regions and be able to compare them to others around the world.

Beginning in 2011, GCIF created an Ontario Working Group to determine the boundaries for what it has termed the "Toronto Urban Region." The working group also helped develop a tool to aggregate the newly defined region's municipal data. Five single-tier municipalities, six upper-tier municipalities, 20 lower-tier municipalities and nine ministries participated in the pilot exercise.

Indicators of TUR's competitiveness were identified so that it could be compared to others regions, such as the Chicago Metropolitan Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Greater Melbourne.

The report focuses on the definition of boundaries for TUR and details the work that was involved in this two-year effort. It also presents GCIF's results and findings on the strategic positioning of TUF for global competitiveness. The aggregation tool used to aggregate TUF's municipal data can now be rolled out to other cities globally.

Yonge Street magazine published an article on the report in its recent issue, which you can read here.

Click here to download a PDF of the report.