“This place is the heart of the community,” says Keegan Henry-Mathieu as we walk through the sunny parking lot of North York Sheridan Mall at Jane St. and Wilson Ave. “There’s not much other public space around here where people can gather like this.”

We’re exploring the lower east corner of Ward 7, where Henry-Mathieu is running for city council.

“This is the Toronto melting pot,” he says of Ward 7. “Immigrants have always come here. It’s a mix of middle and lower incomes. The strip malls show all the variety and you can get everything you need done without leaving the area.”

Like many small community malls around the GTA, Sheridan is filled with mostly independent retailers, and there are makeshift stalls outside that sell CDs, flags and bracelets while reggae booms in the background.

Henry-Mathieu, 27, has been going to City Hall since he was 16, for a time as chair of the Toronto Youth Cabinet, the city’s official youth advisory panel.

Now he’s determined to get into the civics game in a big way, though sprawling Ward 7 is a hard one to pin down. Roughly straddling Hwy. 400 from Hwy. 401 up to Steeles Ave., its western border is the meandering Humber River, with Jane and the 400 alternately serving as the eastern border.

The 400 and a CPR rail corridor limit connections across the ward to just a few main arterial roads. There are also vast industrial zones, further separating residential neighbourhoods.

Black Creek also wiggles its way through Ward 7, sometimes “channelized” in concrete, other times in a somewhat natural state. It separates the mall and residential areas but a busy footbridge connects the two, with ducks underneath, resting on the banks or looking up expectedly for the scraps of bread neighbours sometimes feed them.

Henry-Mathieu wanted to meet at Sheridan Mall because it’s adjacent to Chalkfarm Park, where four towers house some 4,000 people.

“I was told to stay away from Chalkfarm because voter turnout is so low,” he says. “Don’t waste your time, they told me.”

Henry-Mathieu feels it’s that attitude that has led to people feeling so disenfranchised and left out that, if you mention City Hall, residents will “laugh in your face.”

The current councillor, Giorgio Mammoliti, is known for his surprising outbursts and is currently embroiled in a fundraising scandal.

We make our way around the mall parking lot to Chalkfarm Park and the four towers that dominate the skyline here. A pool outside the community centre is filled with the noise of swimming children as we walk by.

The towers have been notorious in the past for crime, but have been on the rebound of late with revitalization efforts that include garbage cleanup and community gardens, though Henry-Mathieu says many of the apartments inside are in deplorable condition, which he hopes to change.

He’s also excited about the potential of the area’s strip malls, suggesting tax incentives for owners could beautify and create better public areas around them, and that the new rules around food trucks could make the mall parking lot even more of a meeting spot.

To the north of the towers are a half-dozen streets of single-family homes, a high- and lowrise mix typical of this ward and the rest of Toronto.

On a second bridge that leads from the park west to another residential neighbourhood, Henry-Mathieu says, “Black Creek could be our High Park if done right.”

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And why not? The creek is here, and so are the trees. They’re just waiting for some political willpower.

Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef

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