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Toronto spent the ’50s and ’60s converting farmland into suburbs populated by single-family houses and nowhere to walk to, Ms. Keesmaat said. “You can’t walk to work, to visit a neighbour, to get your hair cut, to go out for dinner, because it is disconnected from the urban fabric.”

Though she has a fix, it will come over time as multi-use midrise developments with a retail base increasingly pop up on suburban priority arterial roads already served by transit.

But this isn’t a made-in-Toronto plan, it’s part of a North American movement. Municipalities once needed to force walkability on developers by regulation, said Alexander Fleming of Crozier Engineering. But his developer clients now consider walkability a selling point with customers.

“The ecoboom generation wants to walk to work, take transit and cycle,” Ms. Keesmaat said.

North America may be on the path to urbanizing suburbs but people are conflicted, traffic engineer Naji Alimam of LMM Engineering said. They want green but at the same time they also want their double or triple car garages and they want to be on a quiet cul-de-sac.

He said it will take a long time before the suburbs become walkable, and personally, he’s in no hurry. “I live in Oakville in the suburbs and I like it,” he said. “I don’t like the traffic and the very high density of downtown Toronto.”

To doubters who say it’s impossible to make vast suburban tracts walkable, Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says she has 800 examples to prove the opposite.

In the past five years between 150 and 200 suburban rezonings were completed in the U.S. to create mixed-use, walkable developments. Some are huge projects where owners of neighbouring malls joined up their parcels to create a single residential, office and retail development.