If you’ve only ever driven through Cooksville and the intersection of Hurontario and Dundas Sts. in Mississauga, you might buy into the lazy “suburban wasteland” epithets that places like this routinely get from people who don’t know better.

However, getting out of the car and walking reveals a very urban place, one rich with passageways and layers of retail that, if the landscape was less car-oriented, would be celebrated as a multicultural food and culture destination.

Big changes are coming to Cooksville though, and its potential as a major GTA hub may yet be realized.

Sometimes the intersection is called “The 5 and 10,” an old reference to an older Ontario, when Mississauga was mostly rural and a collection of small communities in what was known as Toronto Township. Dundas here was once part of King’s Highway 5, and Hurontario was Highway 10, roads that still exist outside the city as largely rural routes. Traces of the old highways can still be seen on both streets in the form of old houses of various vintages that sit among the newer urban form that has surrounded them.

Cooksville was founded in the early 1800s as a stop on the way to and from Toronto, but over time the streets grew wide to accommodate rapid growth, and Mississauga’s first city hall was located here.

Today the “Four Corners,” as it’s also known, is one of the busiest intersections in the region, with a surrounding population of 11,000 within a few blocks in each direction. Though the intersection grew in size because of car-oriented development, pedestrians now also heavily travel it. In terms of public transit, it’s the Mississauga bus version of the Yonge and Bloor subway station, with scores of people queuing on each corner and crossing many lanes between light cycles to transfer bus stops.

To walk the neighbourhood is to constantly dodge cars coming and going from parking lots. To tame the intersection a bit, the southeast corner, formerly a gas station, was turned into a garden parkette and plaza designed by the landscape architecture firm Janet Rosenberg & Studio with trees, benches, plantings and historic markers. It won a 2014 Mississauga Urban Design Award and is well used by people waiting for the buses. As pleasant as it is, it’s also incredibly loud as a constant stream of double-length buses stop and start in each direction, in addition to the other traffic. Anybody who says buses are better than streetcars or light rail vehicles are ignoring, among other issues, the massive roar bus traffic makes.

More change is coming though: soon construction will start on the Hurontario LRT line, and the City of Mississauga is wrapping up public consultation on the “Dundas Connects” Bus Rapid Transit plan that would see prioritized bus lanes here. All of this will likely bring denser, more urban development along both roads, especially at the 5 and 10, just a few blocks from the Cooksville GO Transit station.

Despite being such a historic and growing hub, within a few hundred metres of the intersection a bucolic calm can still be found. Cooksville Creek flows under Dundas just east of the Four Corners without much fanfare, hidden for a stretch under Jaguar Valley Dr., but a block north and south of here patches of parkland, some of it naturalized, surround it. Birds chirping and running water replace the noise of traffic, though the occasional honk or siren reminds that it’s still nearby.

Like many neighbourhoods in the GTA, Cooksville abruptly changes from a commercial and apartment building landscape to one of single family homes, a common mix in places that grew from farmland to city quickly. Cooksville has a dense mix of apartments, both lowrise and highrise, and townhouses, a cluster that feeds the equally dense retail here.

The “cook” in Cooksville didn’t originally mean food and good eating, but now it does. At first glance the commercial scene here might seem dominated by parasitic quick cash money lender outfits who take advantage of lower-income populations everywhere. But Cooksville has one of the richest affordable food scenes in the GTA, some easily visible in the strip malls along Hurontario and Dundas, but also tucked out of view in enclosed malls and plazas off the main streets.

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Though there’s a proliferation of fences between different properties, there are also many pedestrian passageways, both indoor and out, that rival those in Yorkville. The Newin Centre Mall, hidden away under a raised parking garage, is one of these places, filled with tiny shops and food vendors. You can eat your way through Cooksville, block by block, culture by culture.

Anticipating the change that’s coming, the planning firm Urban Strategies was commissioned to produce a community-driven report in 2016 called “Vision Cooksville.” They found that 70 per cent of the population here were born outside of Canada, with the top non-official languages being Urdo, Polish and Arabic. There are also 600 employers here, most of them small, independent businesses.

The report outlines six guiding principals to steer Cooksville as it goes through its massive change: a vibrant public realm and walkable streets; connected and engaging parks and open spaces; facilities for recreation, library and other services; housing opportunities and choices; local and unique businesses; and a new identity.

The ultimate success of Vision Cooksville will be unleashing the area’s urban and economic potential without pricing out the people and businesses that make it great right now and worth a visit.

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

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