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Several years ago, Jennifer Keesmaat came home to find her daughter, then five, now 14, holding court before a bunch of stuffed animals.

“Sweetheart, what are you doing?” asked Ms. Keesmaat, an urban design consultant at the time, as she looked down at the neatly lined up creatures.

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“I’m holding a public meeting,” the little girl replied. “The people don’t like the tall buildings.”

Ms. Keesmaat told this story this week with a smile, sitting in Regent Park’s Paintbox bistro, in between attending a briefing at city hall and a speech at the Canadian Urban Institute’s annual general meeting.

Now Toronto’s chief planner, at a moment in which the city is on an astounding, historic pace of densification, she had talked to the institute about coaxing “gentle” transformation in neighbourhoods that would like to be “shrink-wrapped.”

Meaning: People may not like the tall buildings (or the mid rise buildings, or even the low ones), but the buildings are coming.