The Canadian West begins at Hurontario St., the mighty big multi-laned spine of really big Mississauga.

In Mississauga City Centre, the somewhat-insecure-sounding name of Canada’s sixth largest city’s downtown, there is space, and lots of it. It feels like Las Vegas, where skyscrapers don’t cluster but spread, rising like giant electric pylons in between parking lots.

The newness of everything here gives it an odd, sci-fi quality. It lacks the patina of age claimed by older cities. There are no old buildings in sight. The twisting hourglass of the “Marilyn Monroe” condo buildings seems like they come from Vegas or Dubai, and their arrival was the first time you may have heard Torontonians jealous of Mississuga.

At night the streets are quiet, save for near-constant echo of crotch-rocket speed bikes and souped-up Hyundais with trumpet mufflers whose drivers seem unable to get out of first gear.

The size of this city has snuck up on the rest of us, and so has its skyline. When visitors arrive at Pearson International Airport for the first time, they often look across the Tarmac to that hump of Mississauga skyscrapers and think “Ah, there’s Toronto.” Remarkable because a little more than 40 years ago, this was all farmland. Mississauga itself didn’t exist until 1968, when the province amalgamated villages and townships into one municipality.

“Old” here means Square One Shopping Centre, the reason this place became the city’s defacto downtown.

Hazel McCallion, then mayor of nearby Streetsville, was there for the sod-turning a few years before the shopping centre opened in 1973. If you walk around its perimeter you can find the old parts of the building — it was, in fact, a square shape originally, with an open-air courtyard in the middle — but like most malls it’s metastasized into an indefinable shape with concrete growths around it. We enter like it’s a sponge, disappearing inside.

The neighbourhood around Square One takes some time to get to on foot.

To the south, the condos are set back from the six- to eight-lane road, and sidewalks meander in narrow, meadow-like space. Shops are sporadic, and some ground-floor living units have been repurposed as stores. Dozens of Wal-Mart carts are up-ended on sidewalks, abandoned near trees and clustered by building doorways, evidence of people walking to the mall, but it being slightly too far away to carry everything home

To the west of the mall is City Hall, a postmodern palace whose balcony overlooks Celebration Square, where McCallion could come out to address her people like the Pope does at The Vatican.

Though new and still figuring itself out, there’s little reason to be smug about young Mississauga. Its core is truly a multicultural mix. People here are talking about transit, about how this place can become a better city in both design and quality of life.

And they’re investing in art and culture.

While Toronto city council discusses closing libraries, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, tucked away inside its City Hall, will soon launch a project that has artists looking at the 18 branches across the city as cultural hubs for each neighbourhood.

With over 20,000 more people expected to occupy new condo buildings in the next two decades, this new place is going to get a lot thicker. Go west, young citizen, the future might be in Mississauga.

This is the first Shawn Micallef’s weekly Friday column exploring where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.

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