So far, Etobicoke’s great gift to the city has been Rob Ford. But that could change.

If councillor and newly appointed planning committee chair Peter Milczyn (Etobicoke-Lakeshore) gets his way, whole swaths of the former borough will be transformed in the decades ahead to a denser, more urban, transit-based, model.

“The idea is to urbanize those parts of Etobicoke that need to be urbanized,” Milczyn explains. “I want to create opportunities for people to live near the subway and places for people to gather. The hope is to give people a sense of community and a sense of place.”

In answer to the only question that matters today — who will pay? — the councillor, and trained architect, proposes to sell city-owned land, but not before it has been pre-zoned and pre-approved for the kind of urban-scale growth appropriate in the 21st century.

As Milczyn points out, the city holds the deeds to a number of sites in Etobicoke, including the Westwood Theatre Lands and the Etobicoke Civic Complex. They range from 4.5 to almost 15 acres, enough to make a difference, and set a new course.

It won’t be easy; just unravelling the mess that is Six Points, better known as Spaghetti Junction, will be a major feat. How it got built remains one of the great mysteries of modern traffic engineering. The great unanswered question is, What were they thinking?

That may never be clear, but Milczyn insists that the whole interchange will be remade in a more rational manner. The environmental assessment has already been completed. The land freed up, all city-owned, will be sold for development.

Another site, a dreary triangular parcel on the northwest corner of Bloor and Islington, has already been the subject of a city-sponsored report. Today, it’s the location of the Islington subway station and several parking lots. Planners envision a row of three towers running along Bloor, the tallest at Islington. The rebuilding would also feature a more generous pedestrian precinct, something noticeable in Etobicoke for its absence.

“I harbour no resentment about what we do downtown,” Milczyn says. “It’s the heart of the city. But we need to do the same for the rest of the city, Scarborough and North York as well as Etobicoke. The problem is that planning in the suburbs tends to be more piecemeal. If there’s land to develop, it should be developed well. But to get developers to move off their formula is difficult; they’re so successful.”

Already, a design review panel has been created to pass a critical eye over proposed projects. “The development industry balked originally,” Milczyn reports, “but it has come to appreciate the panel. It has had a huge impact; and it costs almost nothing. It’s more about the smart use of what we have than huge outlays of public money.”

That may be, but what developers have done so far doesn’t inspire confidence. Mistakes have been made and opportunities squandered that will determine the look of Etobicoke for decades to come.

But as Milczyn notes, “We’re still dealing with the first wave of development; cities go through five or six waves.”

Already there are stretches of, say, Dundas St. W. where a smarter and more urban future has started to appear. Squint a little and you’d swear you were in a city, rather than the unresolved, even contradictory, accumulation of malls, towers, subdivisions and highways that characterizes the suburbs.

Still, it’s refreshing to hear the city’s planning chair talking about Etobicoke in such ambitious terms. He even suggests getting superstar architect Frank Gehry involved. Stranger things have happened — even here.