City of Toronto
City of Toronto Open Data Portal
About the Art
Created in ink and gouache on handmade cotton paper, this abstract expressionist piece grounds itself in the landscape of Toronto. Soft, organic colour forms hug the shoreline of the city. Raked ink rises up across the canvas, following the pathway of the city’s major highways. Stamped lines nod to major streets running north to south.
The ink dots scattered across the composition are drawn from real housing and renovation data tracked by Renovation Watch, a community platform built on the City’s open data. These marks signify the active and completed projects issued for multi-unit housing renovations and building permit applications in 2025.
This piece holds the city’s physical geography and its data alongside one another – a portrait of Toronto made from the very information its Open Data Portal makes public.
Original artwork by Aedán Crooke of Surface Impression. No AI was used in generating this artwork.
Toronto’s official open data platform, where City divisions, boards, agencies and commissions publish machine-readable datasets that can be used, reused and redistributed for free
Toronto’s Open Data Portal gives anyone free access to municipal datasets, tools and request tracking, making government information easier to find, reuse and apply to public questions.
Toronto’s Open Data Portal is built around a simple idea: municipal data should be available for people to use, reuse and redistribute.
The portal is the official source for open data from City divisions, boards, agencies and commissions. Through open.toronto.ca, users can explore and download City data for free and without creating an account. Open data is not just information posted online; it is digital data made available with the technical and legal characteristics needed for it to be freely used, reused and redistributed.
Image transcript
Toronto’s Summer Data
1. Beach Water Quality
2. Swimsafe (Pools)
3. Summer Events
4. Bike Share Toronto
5. Road Restrictions
6. City Services
7. Island Ferry
*Browse the catalogue open.toronto.ca/catalogue
The portal focuses on machine-readable formats which allow the public to go beyond reading a static web page or PDF. Developers, researchers, students, journalists, community organizations and businesses can use the data to generate insights, create analyses, build applications and understand city services and trends.
The City’s datasets are made available under the City’s Open Government Licence, which supports worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual and non-exclusive use for commercial and non-commercial purposes. The portal also allows members of the public to request new datasets. Users can track the status of a request and see whether it is being reviewed, actioned or added to the backlog.
The City has also created a gallery showing known uses of its open data. It shows how businesses, academics, students, journalists, community groups and others are using City data. Together, the gallery and portal make government-held data easier to access, use and apply.
