While Toronto has become a city that thinks like a suburb, Mississauga has quietly turned itself into the opposite, a suburb that thinks like a city. Or at least, a suburb that’s learning to think like a city. Either way, the difference couldn’t be more stark.

For example, where Toronto just opened its first city-owned mall, a grimly familiar gaggle of shops next to the Wilson subway station, Mississauga recently launched a study to look at the “future intensification” of six of that city’s shopping centres.

Though proud of Mississauga’s desire to transform itself, the Commissioner of Planning and Building in Canada’s sixth-largest city, Ed Sajecki, has no illusions. “Quite frankly,” he says, “we’re not even close to New York, London or Paris; what we’re investing in now is catch-up.”

Then again, Mississauga wasn’t incorporated until 1974, which in civic terms means it’s too young to have learned to walk yet, let alone run. On the other hand, Toronto, even after a couple of centuries, remains a municipal Baby Huey, big but small.

“Mississauga is maturing,” Sajecki declares. “I like to say it’s no longer growing out, it’s growing up, not just building high but learning to deal with the issues that other big cities are dealing with.”

Interestingly, Mississauga had to face these big-city issues even before it realized it was a big city. The transformation from satellite suburb to emerging urban conurbation happened while no one was watching. Though Mississauga’s longtime former mayor, Hazel McCallion, began as the Queen of Sprawl, she became an urbanist long before many of her supporters.

McCallion deserves credit for her change of heart, though there was really no alternative. While many municipalities still allow developers to carve up the landscape into subdivisions, Mississauga, to its credit, wants to do something smarter.

Most obviously, perhaps, it begins with public transit. How telling is it that the planned LRT line, which will run north up Hurontario St. from Port Credit to Steeles Ave., will end before it reaches Brampton, which, in a spectacular act of stupidity, refused the provincially funded route in 2015?

Mississauga’s response, by contrast, has been to set about rezoning Hurontario for greater density. Already, developers are selling nearby condos on the basis of their proximity to the LRT. Hurontario in 20 or 30 years will be a fine-grained, bike-laned main street lined by mixed-use towers connected by transit.

“A bigger transit network will help everyone,” says Mississauga’s director of city planning strategies, Andrew Whittemore. “Our objective is to create complete communities. We’re trying to be proactive.”

That word — proactive — is the key to Mississauga’s new civic culture. Sajecki talks about Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm’s brilliant new waterfront neighbourhood, as a model for future development in his city.

Like Waterfront Toronto, the tripartite agency overseeing waterfront revitalization, Hammerby started as part of a failed Olympic bid. Today, it is a hugely successful, leading-edge community constructed around sustainability principles such as transit, district heating and cooling, underground garbage collection, renewable energy and a highly evolved public realm.

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These are approaches that Mississauga will implement on its waterfront, where three massive redevelopment schemes are unfolding. These projects, the largest of which occupies 200 acres of prime real estate, will be where Mississauga enters the 21st century. The fact that each site is empty means planners can incorporate state-of-the-art technology and build fully sustainable communities from the ground up.

Among the obstacles Mississauga planners face is inadequate provincial legislation. Because regulations, including the Ontario Building Code, set a relatively low bar for new development, cities are limited in the demands they can make.

Still, significant progress has been made. “I never thought we’d see the day when the Imperial Oil site would be redeveloped,” admits Mississauga strategic planning leader Jim Doran. If Mississauga officials get their way, the highly polluted 72-acre waterfront parcel just west of Port Credit will become an exemplar of green growth.

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Meanwhile, here in the centre of the universe, Councillor David Shiner, the chair of Build Toronto, told those on hand for the opening of Shops at the Wilson Station last month, “It is a new gathering place for people who are living in this growing residential community to get to by walking, biking or taking public transit, or by car.”

These weasel words and the occasion they marked say everything about a city that has run out of ambition, imagination, and worse still, the energy to care.

Christopher Hume’s column appears weekly. He can be reached at jcwhume4@gmail.com

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