Are all conference centres created equal?

On the day that we bought another team member tickets to the 5th conference of the year in yet another city, we reflected on conferences in years past and thought that not all conference centres are created equal.

This week, two of our team members are at the annual CIP conference, being held in beautiful Toronto, right up on the waterfront. As regular attendees of the annual CIP conferences, and having also attended the PIBC conference here in Vancouver this year, we couldn’t help but compare the location efficiency of each conference centre.

As urbanists attending conferences full of urbanists, location efficiency (ie what location packs the right things in the right place) tends to come up in conversation. And as GIS analysts, if you think we’re going to be arriving to these conferences without a full scale analysis of each location, you’d be wrong. Read on to see how we assessed three of this year's planning conference locations against each other in a totally objective and definitely scientifically rigorous way.

First, locations. We decided to pick three conference locations that we are all bound to frequent:

1. The Westin Harbourfront in Toronto, home of the August 2025 CIP conference,

2. The Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver, home of the July 2025 PIBC conference, and

3. The Banff Park Lodge in Banff, home of the October 2025 APPI conference.

Next, assessment criteria.

In coming up with our assessment criteria, we tried to think about what makes a location ideal for us personally. We want a spot that’s easy to get to, surrounded by the right type of energy, and with lots of amenities. So, we operationalized this into the following attributes:

1. Amenities: Hotels, restaurants, cafes, sweets (as in dessert based shops), and drinks.

2. Transportation: Bike share and bus stops

3. Vibes, otherwise known as public arts amenities: Music venues and music stores, public art, and museums

The last consideration for assessment is travel distance. Although we are all very outdoorsy and athletic GIS nerds, after a long day of conferencing, we thought that maybe we’d be happiest to stay within an 800 metre radius of the conference centre. This 800 metre radius is of course along the road network, not as the crow flies, due to our unfortunate human need to stick to designated roadways rather than walk straight through city blocks.

800m flying vs 800m along a road

The final step was to gather the data and run the analysis. Without giving away all the goods and getting way in the weeds of technical analysis, the general methods are to grab all the available data from municipal open data sources, run an analysis to see how far you can get in 800m taking off in every direction along a road, then count how many of each amenity there are within that area. Simple!

So, after all that.. Here are the results!

Click to expand the maps with all the amenities captured.

Now before you start to call foul, let's interpret these results a bit.

1. Although the waterfront location of the Toronto spot is wonderful in its own right, it actually hampers the access! Of course, if you’re right on the water, you can only walk 800 metres in 3 directions rather than 4. This cuts the total accessible area virtually in half, unless we start providing a lot of floating coffee shops. You might note that if you were to double the number of locations for Toronto (to make up for the fact that you can only go 800m on one side of the water), the number is actually very close to Vancouver’s.

2. Banff’s number, while seeming small, actually pulls its weight per capita. According to the Town of Banff, the summertime daytime population (including tourists) of Banff is likely around 43,000 people! The year round population of Banff is only 8,000. In comparison, according to the 2021 Census, the population of downtown Vancouver, not including tourists, is over 121,000. By that measure, and really any measure, Banff is amenity rich!

3. The qualitative bonus points category: While this might seem like a strange measure, it actually makes perfect sense. The best analysis combines qualitative and quantitative research. We thought, of course the natural beauty of Banff is unparalleled and immeasurable as data points on a map, and so it deserves exactly 764 bonus points. Toronto in its own right has the spectacular reputation of downtown Canada, the focal point around which all our Canadian identity swirls, and how do you really measure that on a map? For that, 668 bonus points! And finally, our dear Vancouver. We could never deign to quantitatively capture what it means to be able to call Vancouver home, and for that, we award 227 bonus points.

And thus, our first place overall winner, by the smallest of margins, is Vancouver! Who could have predicted this result from a Vancouver based shop? Not us, certainly.

See you at a conference!

The LGeo Team

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Caveats to the above:

1. The amenity data is from open street maps. If it is wrong, please take it up with OSM, or better yet, harness the power of open data and update it yourself!

2. The incidence of each location is equal to 1 point here. In reality, if this were a true project or analysis, you would likely want to weight this. One person might think that a coffee shop is worth two points while a bar is worth zero. It just depends on the purpose of the analysis!

3. This is all in good fun and not serious - we love all these spots for different reasons and are so pleased with the variety the three together provide.