Mississauga’s towering new ambition
Sexy highrises a symbol of city’s evolution into model of urban growth
Architects like creating big, sexy things. And they like to do them in big, sexy cities. So now that Mississauga arguably has the biggest, sexiest pair of buildings in the world, it figures the rest of its downtown should follow.
“Mississauga is not Paris, yet,” says Attila Burka. His firm, Burka Architects, partnered to create Absolute World, often called the Marilyn Monroe towers because of their curving exteriors. The two skyscrapers have become the Eiffel Tower of Mississauga’s skyline.
They are joined by more than five dozen other highrises built in the city’s centre, where new residents are redefining Mississauga’s old identity as a sprawling bedroom community west of Toronto.
“Currently, our city centre is experiencing a type of development renaissance,” says downtown Councillor Frank Dale. “The Absolute/ Marilyn project was a key component of our growth, and has acted as a catalyst for further development in the city centre district.”
After decades of growth, Mississauga is almost built out. Now, with new provincial guidelines in place for intensification within its city centre as part of Ontario’s “Places to Grow” strategy and the city’s own ambitious “Downtown 21” plan, the country’s sixth-largest city is finally growing up.
“The fact that Mississauga now has a skyline and the Marilyn towers — that’s how I define a city,” says Nicole Nath, who moved into a highrise condo in downtown Mississauga two years ago with her young family.
She lived in the city off and on while growing up and remembers when the city’s centre was little more than Square One Mall and hayfields. Today, Nath says, “using the word ‘downtown’ in Mississauga is weird.”
The change has been dramatic. According to city staff, the population of the nascent city centre in 1981 was just 259. In 2011 it was 24,000.
Mississauga’s new commitment to intensification, the province says, is what the entire region around Toronto should be doing to avoid future sprawl and congestion.
THE DEVELOPMENT
of a truly urban core is no accident.
“Where (Harold) Shipp’s four buildings are now, cows and horses were grazing there in 1978,” says Mayor Hazel McCallion, referring to the Mississauga Executive Centre. “To think this used to be a hayfield not long ago, we’ve done pretty well.”
McCallion says the vision for a real downtown began in the mid-’70s, when residential and commercial development was concentrated in core areas of the various townships incorporated in 1974 as the City of Mississauga.
“We envisioned 12 million square feet of office, commercial space. There was no city centre here back then. The buildings would all connect either underground or overhead,” she says.
But there were barriers, not least of all the huge shopping mall and parking lot smack in the middle of the city. There were recessions and there was cheaper land elsewhere in the city where business parks popped up, such as around Pearson airport and Meadowvale. In 2006, McCallion announced a development group was launching Mississauga’s first international competition to design what would become the Marilyn towers. That followed the province’s introduction of its growth strategy, which demanded that areas such as Mississauga’s city centre intensify in order to keep development from sprawling ever farther north. In 2008, the city partnered with investors to commission what would become its “Downtown 21 Master Plan.” It may not be rocket science, but Dale’s enthusiasm soars when he talks about it. The premise: replace sprawling downtown parking lots with “Main Street” features; shorten some blocks and streets; bring in specialty retail such as cafés, restaurants and boutiques at street level; build more office and commercial space so people can live and work in the same neighbourhood; and install a light rapid transit line (being planned for about $1.5 billion) right through the heart of the city, supported by other transit to keep cars at bay. “We want to turn the area into a walkable, pedestrian-friendly downtown,” says Dale, who recognizes the challenges that lie ahead. “I don’t think I’ve heard of another city that’s grown from the outside in.” But he can’t resist a little gloating, mentioning that the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance recently replaced the CN Tower on the cover of its own promotional material with the Marilyn towers.
Burka, who studied Mississauga’s downtown when he helped build the towers, says the entire vision is absolutely doable. But it will take more than just building upward.
“The tall buildings are the pistons; they put people there. But once they’re there, they don’t know what to do. You can’t just have a huge shopping mall. ”
ON THE FOURTH
floor of city hall, protected by Plexiglas, sits the model for what Mississauga is building toward.
McCallion gazes over her downtown of the future in miniature form. It takes up most of a room the size of an average bungalow, some 225 buildings in all. It almost looks like Toronto’s current skyline. But instead of the iconic CN Tower, two flirtatious miniature skyscrapers define this cityscape.
About 125 of the buildings in the model are now built. Thirty years ago, only seven were built.
“We have a long way to go,” says McCallion. “This is the future of the sixth largest city in Canada. When people say, ‘I’m going downtown tonight,’ it will be downtown Mississauga, not Toronto.”