Edmonton Zone Map

Earlier this week, there was a bit of a kerfuffle raised at City Council when they contentiously passed a motion to allow a new 16-storey building near Whyte Avenue. In order to allow the new building, they had to change some of the zoning around the area.

I was curious about exactly what the distribution of zones in Edmonton look like, so I decided to see if I could find a map. Oddly enough, despite the data being available on the city's OpenData portal, there wasn't a readily-available one to be found via Google.

And maybe there's a good reason - it turns out there are over 85 different zone descriptors that the city uses, and many of the individually set zones are actually rather tiny (small parks count as their own zone, for instance). If you coloured a map based on all the different types of zones, it would be a scary kaleidoscope that wouldn't be terribly useful.

So instead, I've reverted to the tried and true Sim City method and labelled things broadly as either Residential, Commercial, or Industrial zones. Take a look:



If you've lived in Edmonton for more than a couple minutes, I'm sure that this map isn't surprising to you at all. I find it still cool to actually see things laid out like this though - it really shows you the industrial moat that surrounds Mill Woods, for instance, and specifically locates all of the strip malls we seem so fond of. (If your favorite strip mall isn't coded blue, it's most likely because many areas tend to end up as 'Site Specific Development Control Provision', which is essentially bylaw code for 'none of the above'. I didn't end up colour coding them all because there 650 of them, mostly all for different reasons...)

One final thought: I'm not so sure I like the sounds of the Anthony Henday being an agricultural zone. Hopefully they keep the agriculture and the four lanes of speeding gas guzzlers a little separated...