unimaginative2
Senior Member
Could Mississauga ever, ever be sexy?
LISA ROCHON
The Globe and Mail
November 17, 2007
MISSISSAUGA -- You may recall Mississauga as that sleepy expanse of suburbia where teenage girls would travel from outposts like Toronto and Oakville to purchase cheap blouses at a gigantic shopping centre. A city provoked into being not because of a historic mill operation or military fort but because of the construction of Square One. A development-happy place where the last cornfield has been transformed into cookie-cutter housing.
Is it possible to imagine someplace so overwhelmingly bland and generic transforming into a great city?
Short answer, no. Long answer, yes.
The short answer is that it's too late to retrieve a place that fell hard for the standard American model of suburban life, a model based on highways and lack of public transportation initiated by the Ontario government during the 1960s, and blessed over the last three decades by the local government of Mayor Hazel McCallion and her small and obedient council.
And, besides, who are we to presume that Mississaugans want a walkable, more delightful and possibly disordered city? Jobs are plentiful, streets are safe, and there is a virtual United Nations of people efficiently accommodated in a variety of housing, from high-rise apartments to townhouses to single-family houses with double garages. It works. Leave it alone.
For decades, it's been convenient to ignore Mississauga as Toronto's soporific bedroom community. Except that, turns out, strong coffee is percolating in the hinterland. With a population of 700,000, Mississauga has become difficult to ignore: It is Canada's sixth-largest city, with at least as many jobs as people in the labour force.
And there's a quiet revolution taking place there. Teenagers meeting with Mississauga planners are expressing a desire for a vibrant downtown that comes with clubs and restaurants. A thousand people have turned out each week over the last four Tuesdays for an ongoing speakers' series, called A Conversation About Building a City for the 21st Century, at Mississauga's Living Arts Centre.
Urban visionaries - Copenhagen designer and author Jan Gehl, influential Vancouver planner Larry Beasley, as well as Justin Trudeau, Stephen Lewis and Roberta Bondar - have been invited to trigger an outpouring of creative thinking about city-building among locals.
The lecture series is part of an impressively ambitious program facilitated by Office for Urbanism, a Toronto-based urban-design studio, that will include a three-day workshop for citizens in February. Electrifying, high-volume civic boosterism is at work in Mississauga.
After every lecture, the tireless McCallion - once the mother of sprawl, now the chief cheerleader of a sustainable city - punches the air with her fist, her eyes burn a fearsome blue, and she calls for the people in the audience to send her their dreams, not their nightmares.
For decades, Mississauga has provided an alternative to the intensity of urban life. Few outsiders realize it is huge - about five times the footprint of Manhattan - an artificial composition of such charming historic towns as Port Credit and Streetsville, with lots of faceless stuff in between.
Its industrial parklands isolate buildings - and people - from each other. In the downtown, architecture tends to be brick-clad anonymous constructions, or frothy and sweet: overly embellished and nostalgic.
Currently there are no height restrictions in the downtown and, although city planners are insisting on greater investment in the public realm, developers have been essentially free to build anonymous towers with little attention to the street. Reflecting glass is bad enough. But when it's pink reflecting glass, it becomes all-out aesthetic warfare.
Two events during the mid-1970s proved critical to Mississauga's viability: The first was the arrival in Toronto of David Crombie's reform government and the decision to prevent the construction of high-rise towers in its downtown through what was called the 45-foot-holding bylaw. Exit developers of high-rises to the 905 region.
The other watershed event was the massive exodus of anglophones and corporations from Montreal following the 1976 election of René Lévesque's Parti Québécois. Mississauga's low property taxes and free parking enticed. And a general complacency around architectural quality helped to lure manufacturers and head offices.
Today, at least half of Mississauga's population was born outside Canada.
During one of my visits there this week, I stopped in at a Polish bakery in a neighbourhood mall surrounded by shops catering to immigrants from India and Pakistan. The video store had no end of both Hollywood and Bollywood films.
Among urban intellectuals, it is common practice to sneer at Mississauga as a place of white-bread culture and low, sprawling density. In fact, what's remarkable about the place is that it boasts among the highest densities of any suburban community in North America, according to the distinguished urban-planning academic Larry Bourne. And, unlike communities that show little interest in transforming into vibrant cities, the people at the front lines (and behind the scenes) in Mississauga are determined to bring dramatic change.
Okay, now the long answer to Mississauga's chance at hitting urban greatness. And it depends on a single word: willingness.
McCallion's willingness was most recently encapsulated by a special 5-per-cent infrastructure levy.. Mississauga's urban designers are currently acting on the recommendations of a platoon of hired advisers, including the hotshot Project for Public Spaces consultants from New York.
One of their key recommendations was to animate existing spaces by the power of 10: "In every public space that we have, we should be thinking about 10 things that people can do." Bring the experiences - whether skating or public art - to the street; bring down the brick walls enclosing city-hall square.
Based on such recommendations, says Ed Sajecki, Mississauga's commissioner of planning and building, a request for capital expenditures has been made. And my bet is that the money will be handed over to Sajecki's team.
Three things need to happen in order to move Mississauga from a job-rich place of ugliness to a city that matters. First, cut into the enormous grid of streets to create shorter blocks and narrower streets, an industry standard for the world's most walkable cities, from San Francisco to Paris to Cairo. Ways to do this in Mississauga are currently being worked out by Toronto's Urban Design Strategies and the Florida-based designers and transportation planners Glatting Jackson.
Second, demand excellence in architecture - the kind that connects meaningfully and elegantly to the street, and creates towers of enduring materials. Anybody who doesn't make the cut can take a hike.
Third, invest heavily in the public realm. Sajecki understands this: "It's not about how dense you make it, but how you make it dense."
During his keynote presentation this week in Mississauga, Danish designer Gehl insisted that engaging all the senses is impossible when moving at the speed of a car. At 60 kilometres an hour, little is expected from the haptic, sensory experience: blossoming trees to alert our sense of smell; the feel of granite or grass underfoot; the potential for benches and fences to be beautifully crafted.
"There is something called 'humanscape,' " said Gehl. "We are born as a walking animal - we are slow, we are linear, we can move a maximum of five kilometres an hour. ... How we move, how our senses work, all of these elementary things go with being a human being. ... But there is another scale only 50 years old, and this is the 60 kilometres-an-hour scale."
Following four decades of research, numerous books and careful observation of cities and suburbs, Gehl's conclusion is this: "Slow is beautiful, small is beautiful and low is beautiful."
Are we excited for Mississauga that a shapely tower nicknamed the Marilyn Monroe is coming to town? In part, yes. The architect, Yansong Ma, belongs to a handful of emerging Chinese designers, educated in the West and having trained with a starchitect. In his case, Ma completed graduate studies at Yale before going on to work with London-based Zaha Hadid.
Ma's spiralling glass tower won an international design competition launched by Cityzen, the developers of the Absolute City Centre of which Marilyn is the showpiece: a five-tower complex located at the corner of thoroughfares Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario, across from Square One, in downtown Mississauga.
But don't expect the sexy, 56-storey showpiece to instantly transform Mississauga into an urbane, dynamic city. For one thing, how the building meets the street was originally presented as an awkward strip of townhouses that looked glue-gunned onto poor Marilyn. Bad shoes, in other words, on great legs. Sajecki is promising that the city will get it right and, on that front, has called in British architect Will Alsop to fix the ground floor. Wait for it: Many eyes are fixed upon the total body of the tower.
Meanwhile, the city is adding more buses to an already impressive service in order to seduce more people to use public transit. And it has applied for funding from the Ontario government for a light-rail transit system to run the length of Hurontario, a major piece of infrastructure that could cost some $700-million. Such is the kind of investment that major cities throughout the Western world have already made. More public transit that runs through pleasurable landscapes is vital if Mississauga wants to convert into an accessible, more sustainable land mass.
I'm sitting in my car waiting to turn onto one of Mississauga's yawning boulevards. An older man with a mop of white hair veers off the sidewalk to sidle up for conversation. He's interested in my SmartCar, so we chat about the marvels of the vehicle and the way he spends his day wandering the streets of Mississauga, feeding the birds. Then he upsets the pleasant rhythm of our chat to assert that Jesus Christ is the Lord Our Saviour. And he asks me this question: "Are you born again?"
I have to disappoint him, but he raises an interesting point. It strikes me that McCallion is exactly that: a born-again Mississaguan who has seen the light. And now she is repenting for tripping down the path of sleepy suburbia. Following another path - one that is tree-lined and nicely detailed with granite cobblestones, tight enough in scale to allow people to notice each other - has become her new religion.
And that of a whole lot of people who worship the idea of a great city.
lrochon@globeandmail.com
LISA ROCHON
The Globe and Mail
November 17, 2007
MISSISSAUGA -- You may recall Mississauga as that sleepy expanse of suburbia where teenage girls would travel from outposts like Toronto and Oakville to purchase cheap blouses at a gigantic shopping centre. A city provoked into being not because of a historic mill operation or military fort but because of the construction of Square One. A development-happy place where the last cornfield has been transformed into cookie-cutter housing.
Is it possible to imagine someplace so overwhelmingly bland and generic transforming into a great city?
Short answer, no. Long answer, yes.
The short answer is that it's too late to retrieve a place that fell hard for the standard American model of suburban life, a model based on highways and lack of public transportation initiated by the Ontario government during the 1960s, and blessed over the last three decades by the local government of Mayor Hazel McCallion and her small and obedient council.
And, besides, who are we to presume that Mississaugans want a walkable, more delightful and possibly disordered city? Jobs are plentiful, streets are safe, and there is a virtual United Nations of people efficiently accommodated in a variety of housing, from high-rise apartments to townhouses to single-family houses with double garages. It works. Leave it alone.
For decades, it's been convenient to ignore Mississauga as Toronto's soporific bedroom community. Except that, turns out, strong coffee is percolating in the hinterland. With a population of 700,000, Mississauga has become difficult to ignore: It is Canada's sixth-largest city, with at least as many jobs as people in the labour force.
And there's a quiet revolution taking place there. Teenagers meeting with Mississauga planners are expressing a desire for a vibrant downtown that comes with clubs and restaurants. A thousand people have turned out each week over the last four Tuesdays for an ongoing speakers' series, called A Conversation About Building a City for the 21st Century, at Mississauga's Living Arts Centre.
Urban visionaries - Copenhagen designer and author Jan Gehl, influential Vancouver planner Larry Beasley, as well as Justin Trudeau, Stephen Lewis and Roberta Bondar - have been invited to trigger an outpouring of creative thinking about city-building among locals.
The lecture series is part of an impressively ambitious program facilitated by Office for Urbanism, a Toronto-based urban-design studio, that will include a three-day workshop for citizens in February. Electrifying, high-volume civic boosterism is at work in Mississauga.
After every lecture, the tireless McCallion - once the mother of sprawl, now the chief cheerleader of a sustainable city - punches the air with her fist, her eyes burn a fearsome blue, and she calls for the people in the audience to send her their dreams, not their nightmares.
For decades, Mississauga has provided an alternative to the intensity of urban life. Few outsiders realize it is huge - about five times the footprint of Manhattan - an artificial composition of such charming historic towns as Port Credit and Streetsville, with lots of faceless stuff in between.
Its industrial parklands isolate buildings - and people - from each other. In the downtown, architecture tends to be brick-clad anonymous constructions, or frothy and sweet: overly embellished and nostalgic.
Currently there are no height restrictions in the downtown and, although city planners are insisting on greater investment in the public realm, developers have been essentially free to build anonymous towers with little attention to the street. Reflecting glass is bad enough. But when it's pink reflecting glass, it becomes all-out aesthetic warfare.
Two events during the mid-1970s proved critical to Mississauga's viability: The first was the arrival in Toronto of David Crombie's reform government and the decision to prevent the construction of high-rise towers in its downtown through what was called the 45-foot-holding bylaw. Exit developers of high-rises to the 905 region.
The other watershed event was the massive exodus of anglophones and corporations from Montreal following the 1976 election of René Lévesque's Parti Québécois. Mississauga's low property taxes and free parking enticed. And a general complacency around architectural quality helped to lure manufacturers and head offices.
Today, at least half of Mississauga's population was born outside Canada.
During one of my visits there this week, I stopped in at a Polish bakery in a neighbourhood mall surrounded by shops catering to immigrants from India and Pakistan. The video store had no end of both Hollywood and Bollywood films.
Among urban intellectuals, it is common practice to sneer at Mississauga as a place of white-bread culture and low, sprawling density. In fact, what's remarkable about the place is that it boasts among the highest densities of any suburban community in North America, according to the distinguished urban-planning academic Larry Bourne. And, unlike communities that show little interest in transforming into vibrant cities, the people at the front lines (and behind the scenes) in Mississauga are determined to bring dramatic change.
Okay, now the long answer to Mississauga's chance at hitting urban greatness. And it depends on a single word: willingness.
McCallion's willingness was most recently encapsulated by a special 5-per-cent infrastructure levy.. Mississauga's urban designers are currently acting on the recommendations of a platoon of hired advisers, including the hotshot Project for Public Spaces consultants from New York.
One of their key recommendations was to animate existing spaces by the power of 10: "In every public space that we have, we should be thinking about 10 things that people can do." Bring the experiences - whether skating or public art - to the street; bring down the brick walls enclosing city-hall square.
Based on such recommendations, says Ed Sajecki, Mississauga's commissioner of planning and building, a request for capital expenditures has been made. And my bet is that the money will be handed over to Sajecki's team.
Three things need to happen in order to move Mississauga from a job-rich place of ugliness to a city that matters. First, cut into the enormous grid of streets to create shorter blocks and narrower streets, an industry standard for the world's most walkable cities, from San Francisco to Paris to Cairo. Ways to do this in Mississauga are currently being worked out by Toronto's Urban Design Strategies and the Florida-based designers and transportation planners Glatting Jackson.
Second, demand excellence in architecture - the kind that connects meaningfully and elegantly to the street, and creates towers of enduring materials. Anybody who doesn't make the cut can take a hike.
Third, invest heavily in the public realm. Sajecki understands this: "It's not about how dense you make it, but how you make it dense."
During his keynote presentation this week in Mississauga, Danish designer Gehl insisted that engaging all the senses is impossible when moving at the speed of a car. At 60 kilometres an hour, little is expected from the haptic, sensory experience: blossoming trees to alert our sense of smell; the feel of granite or grass underfoot; the potential for benches and fences to be beautifully crafted.
"There is something called 'humanscape,' " said Gehl. "We are born as a walking animal - we are slow, we are linear, we can move a maximum of five kilometres an hour. ... How we move, how our senses work, all of these elementary things go with being a human being. ... But there is another scale only 50 years old, and this is the 60 kilometres-an-hour scale."
Following four decades of research, numerous books and careful observation of cities and suburbs, Gehl's conclusion is this: "Slow is beautiful, small is beautiful and low is beautiful."
Are we excited for Mississauga that a shapely tower nicknamed the Marilyn Monroe is coming to town? In part, yes. The architect, Yansong Ma, belongs to a handful of emerging Chinese designers, educated in the West and having trained with a starchitect. In his case, Ma completed graduate studies at Yale before going on to work with London-based Zaha Hadid.
Ma's spiralling glass tower won an international design competition launched by Cityzen, the developers of the Absolute City Centre of which Marilyn is the showpiece: a five-tower complex located at the corner of thoroughfares Burnhamthorpe and Hurontario, across from Square One, in downtown Mississauga.
But don't expect the sexy, 56-storey showpiece to instantly transform Mississauga into an urbane, dynamic city. For one thing, how the building meets the street was originally presented as an awkward strip of townhouses that looked glue-gunned onto poor Marilyn. Bad shoes, in other words, on great legs. Sajecki is promising that the city will get it right and, on that front, has called in British architect Will Alsop to fix the ground floor. Wait for it: Many eyes are fixed upon the total body of the tower.
Meanwhile, the city is adding more buses to an already impressive service in order to seduce more people to use public transit. And it has applied for funding from the Ontario government for a light-rail transit system to run the length of Hurontario, a major piece of infrastructure that could cost some $700-million. Such is the kind of investment that major cities throughout the Western world have already made. More public transit that runs through pleasurable landscapes is vital if Mississauga wants to convert into an accessible, more sustainable land mass.
I'm sitting in my car waiting to turn onto one of Mississauga's yawning boulevards. An older man with a mop of white hair veers off the sidewalk to sidle up for conversation. He's interested in my SmartCar, so we chat about the marvels of the vehicle and the way he spends his day wandering the streets of Mississauga, feeding the birds. Then he upsets the pleasant rhythm of our chat to assert that Jesus Christ is the Lord Our Saviour. And he asks me this question: "Are you born again?"
I have to disappoint him, but he raises an interesting point. It strikes me that McCallion is exactly that: a born-again Mississaguan who has seen the light. And now she is repenting for tripping down the path of sleepy suburbia. Following another path - one that is tree-lined and nicely detailed with granite cobblestones, tight enough in scale to allow people to notice each other - has become her new religion.
And that of a whole lot of people who worship the idea of a great city.
lrochon@globeandmail.com
