Walk ten minutes in any direction from your school and you will cross several different worlds. Houses and apartments give way to a strip of shops, then perhaps a hospital, a rail line, a warehouse, a park or a farm field. None of this is random. Every piece of land in a community is being used for something, and the pattern of those uses decides how long your commute is, whether you can walk to buy groceries, how noisy your street is and whether your basement floods in a storm. Geographers call this pattern land use, and reading it is the first step to understanding what makes a community liveable.
Seven types of land use
| Land use | What it includes | Where it usually locates, and why |
|---|---|---|
| Residential | Detached houses, semi-detached houses, townhouses, apartment and condo buildings | Across most of a city; usually the largest share of built-up land. Taller, denser housing near downtown and transit, where land costs more |
| Commercial | Stores, offices, restaurants, banks, malls, hotels | Where many customers can reach them: downtown, along main streets, at highway interchanges and big intersections |
| Industrial | Factories, warehouses, distribution centres, rail yards, refineries | Along railways, highways, ports and waterfronts for shipping; often kept apart from homes because of noise, traffic and pollution |
| Institutional | Schools, colleges, hospitals, government offices, libraries, community centres, prisons | Spread through neighbourhoods (schools) or at central, accessible sites (hospitals, city hall) |
| Transportation | Roads, highways, parking lots, rail lines, transit corridors, airports, ports | Links every other land use; in car-oriented suburbs, roads and parking can take up a surprisingly large share of the land |
| Open space and recreation | Parks, ravines, sports fields, conservation areas, golf courses, cemeteries | River valleys and floodplains that are risky to build on, plus parks planned into new neighbourhoods |
| Agricultural | Crop land, pasture, orchards, greenhouses, farm buildings | Outside built-up areas on good soils, often at the rural–urban fringe where cities are growing |
The pattern inside a city
Land uses sort themselves out because of accessibility and land value. The most accessible spot in an older city is usually the centre, where roads, rail and transit lines meet. Many businesses want to be there, so land is expensive and buildings go up rather than out: that is the central business district (CBD) of office towers. Industry grew up along the railways and waterfronts that carried its goods. Housing spread outward as streetcars, then cars, let people live farther from work. Today shopping centres and big-box stores cluster at highway exits, where drivers from a wide area can reach them. Each city has its own twist, but this general pattern repeats across Canada.
- Central business district (CBD): offices, government, hotels and entertainment; the tallest buildings and highest land values (for example, downtown Toronto around King and Bay).
- Older inner-city neighbourhoods: houses and low-rise apartments built before most people owned cars, often on a grid of streets close to shops and transit.
- Industrial zones: along rail lines, highways and waterfronts; many older ones have closed and been rebuilt as housing and parks (a former industrial site is called a brownfield).
- Suburbs: newer, mostly residential neighbourhoods with curving streets and cul-de-sacs, designed around the car.
- Highway commercial: malls, big-box stores and business parks at highway interchanges.
- Rural–urban fringe: the edge where farmland, new subdivisions, gravel pits and estate lots meet and compete for land.
- Mostly residential, commercial and transportation land
- High land values, so taller and denser buildings
- Industry pushed to the edges or replaced by housing
- Parks are scarce and precious; ravines and river valleys protected
- Mostly agricultural, forest or open land around a small built-up core
- Lower land values, larger lots, single-detached homes
- Services (school, clinic, store) clustered in one centre or in a larger town far away
- In the North, an airstrip, port or winter road may be the only link to the rest of Canada
Nature and climate change shape land use
| Physical feature or process | How it limits land use | Canadian example |
|---|---|---|
| Floodplains | Low land beside rivers floods naturally; building there puts people and property at risk | After Hurricane Hazel (1954) killed 81 people in the Toronto area, Ontario stopped most building on floodplains and turned many river valleys into parks (Unit 2) |
| Wetlands | Marshes and swamps soak up floodwater, filter water and shelter wildlife; draining them for farms or houses removes those services | Much of southern Ontario's original wetland area was drained for farms and cities, so the most significant remaining wetlands are now protected in provincial planning policy |
| Permafrost | Heated buildings can thaw the frozen ground beneath them, so foundations sink and crack; thaw from a warming climate makes this worse | In Inuvik and Iqaluit many buildings stand on piles above the ground, and in Inuvik water and sewer pipes run in insulated above-ground boxes called utilidors |
| Forest fire risk | Homes built where towns meet forest (the wildland–urban interface) can be reached by wildfire | The 2016 Fort McMurray fire forced about 88,000 people to evacuate and destroyed about 2,400 homes and other buildings; in July 2024 a wildfire destroyed 358 of the 1,113 structures in the Jasper townsite |
| Steep slopes, escarpments and eroding shorelines | Unstable land can slide or wash away | Building limits along the Scarborough Bluffs and the Niagara Escarpment; setbacks on eroding Great Lakes and Atlantic shorelines |
Climate change is redrawing this map. Heavier downpours mean that floodplain maps drawn decades ago can underestimate today's risk, so many municipalities and conservation authorities are updating them. Longer, hotter fire seasons have pushed communities to adopt FireSmart practices: clearing brush near homes, using fire-resistant roofing and planning fuel breaks around towns. In the North, thawing permafrost forces communities to rebuild roads and runways and to plan new buildings on piles or on gravel pads. Planning for the climate we will have, not the one we used to have, is now part of deciding how land should be used (see Climate Change in Canada, Unit 2).