If you look at a map of Canada, the sheer size of the country might lead you to believe that most Canadians live in rural or remote communities. If you're on top of your real estate trends, you'll know that condo development has soared in major cities during the last 20 years, so you may think more people live downtown than anywhere else.

You'd be wrong on both counts. The majority of Canadians live in the suburbs.

A recent study by Queen's University researcher and urban planner David Gordon and his students shows that more than two-thirds of Canada's population, some 22.5 million people, are suburbanites.

"If we are going to have a more sustainable country, we have to figure out what to do about these suburbs," says Gordon. "Many policy-makers over-estimate the size of the highly visible downtown core and underestimate the vast growth happening in the suburban edges."

He says that within every one of Canada's 33 census metropolitan areas, more than 80 per cent of residents live in the suburbs.

Speaking to Postmedia News, Gordon said, "More people live in 905 than in 416 (area codes in Toronto); more people off the Island of Montreal than on; more outside the City of Vancouver than inside the city." Postmedia published an infographic with detailed mapsshowing the suburban/urban breakdown for each of the country's 33 Census tracts.

It shows that Calgary is the most automobile-oriented of the major metropolitan areas, with 85 per cent of residents living in the suburbs.

While Statistics Canada has always defined the population as either urban or rural, Gordon's study broke down the metropolitan regions into four categories.

The Exurbs are low-density areas where most houses are serviced by wells and septic tanks, and where more than half the workers commute to the central core. This represents about eight per cent of metropolitan populations.

The Automobile Suburbs are subdivisions where almost all the residents commute by automobile. A whopping 69 per cent of the population of Canada's 33 metropolitan areas live here.

The Transit Suburbs - generally older, "inner suburb" communities where more people commute by public transit, represents about 11 per cent of metropolitan population. This category varied widely, the study says, depending on the coverage of the local transit system. Service is minimal in many small and medium-sized metropolitan areas, it says.

The Active Core, where many residents are able to walk or cycle to work, represents only about 12 per cent of the country's metropolitan population.

"Unfortunately, very little of the 1.5 million new population growth in Canada's metropolitan areas from 2006-2011 took place in these active cores, with the exception of highly visible condo booms in Toronto and Vancouver," says a Queen's University news release about the study. "The active core neighbourhoods only grew by 89,000 people or three per cent of the total metropolitan growth of over 1.5 million people nation-wide. Many smaller cities saw their core neighbourhoods shrink in population as children moved out and family size continued to decline."

Gordon told Postmedia that, "Some of my urban-design colleagues think of people who live in suburbs as living some kind of minority, deviant lifestyle. They're not just the majority of the country, they're the super-majority."

But Gordon says most subdivisions are poorly designed. Other studies have shown that the car culture of the suburbs discourages physical activity, leading to obesity and other health issues. He also sees potential problems as the population ages and seniors are stuck in their suburban homes, once they are unable to drive. Many won't have local amenities within walking distance and public transit is inadequate in most suburbs.

Doug Saunders, a columnist with The Globe and Mail, recently wrote about another huge part of the population that is hiding in plain sight – those who live in suburban high-rise apartment buildings. "The dwelling that's most Canadian, in its sheer numbers and popularity, is the slab farm – the block of high-rise rental apartment buildings, generally constructed between 1955 and 1979, located closer to the countryside than the city hall, in the suburbs or fringes of major cities," wrote Saunders.

He says Canada is the "world leader in non-downtown high-rise living", stating that Ottawa has more apartment buildings than Dallas and Edmonton has more than Boston.

But although these buildings offer cheaper rental accommodation than downtown buildings, they have the same suburban issues as the subdivisions – few nearby amenities and spotty public transit service. German architect Thomas Sieverts calls them "cities without cities", says Saunders.

In another recent Globe and Mail story, David Hughes of the Mortgage Group Ontario outlines a case that living in the suburbs is actually more expensive than living in the city. He says if you have two adults who must commute to the city each day in separate cars, the money you save by purchasing a cheaper house can be eaten up by commuting costs.

But despite the best efforts of planners to discourage urban sprawl and promote urban intensification, the lure of a home in a suburban setting is still strong, as Gordon's study proves.