Mississauga City Centre skyline has been developing nicely, but it is still lacking something important: office development. In the past 20 years, there have been dozens of new residential towers, but only one small, tiny, little office building. And all the development has been on greenfields. No redevelopment of parking lots. Too much demand for parking space. Not enough transit. Not enough bike lanes. Thus, office development is too expensive, and maybe kinda pointless with Toronto so close by. So that is an important missing ingredient, not just for aesthetics, but also function. MCC is still not a true live/work environment.
That's not to say there hasn't been commercial development at all. There is still plenty of retail at the base of buildings, so residents can just walk downstairs to the store. But they don't necessarily have to walk much further and fill the streets. That's the whole point of urban, isn't it? To reduce distances. Urban = short distances. Suburban = semi-rural = long distances. So if residents don't need to fill the sidewalks, maybe MCC is successful there. But to be truly a success, residents shouldn't also fill the buses and roads. They shouldn't have to go outside the neighbourhood.
You can see Mississauga and Brampton has been successful at getting lots of people to use transit, and having lots of jobs within their boundaries is the most important ingredient. Reducing distances, jobs closer to homes, that how to get people to live a more urban lifestyle. What is the next step for urbanization, after transit? Cycling. Reducing distances enough for people to get on the bike, then parking spaces can be reduced, then next step will be pedestrians, then MCC can become more like a downtown.
But right now, maybe it is not fair to compare it to a downtown. Again, it is entirely greenfield developments like a new subdivision, and it is still full of greenfields. Maybe that is another barrier. Why build on greyfields when you can still build on greenfields?
You guys can see similar attempts in
Markham Centre and Oakville's
Uptown Core. Similar attempts, similar problems, but maybe they are actually an interesting alternative to a typical subdivision? Maybe they aren't actually such a bad thing?
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. Would have been a perfect punctuation !! mark for all the bricky new medium-rise projects east of the core (a great addition to the Distillery District neighbourhood too, though something smaller/similiar is in the pipeline).
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