One of the problems of living in a suburb, like I do, is you’re always reminded that your city is always looked upon as being inferior to the metropolis that borders it. While out here, in the hinterlands of the Greater Toronto Area we call Mississauga, we may not have an inferiority complex, we do have a lack of architectural personality.
For the longest time, Mississauga had been all about sprawl. Look at any point on a map and you can see we’re less a city than a collection of subdivisions and shopping plazas. I think we have more space devoted to parking lots than roads…but I’m getting off topic. Sprawl. As recently as 1995, our city had many tracts of old farmland, so it was nothing for our city council to rezone it for residential and build a few hundred detached homes, add a grocery store somewhere in there, and move on. No condo skyrises, no commercial towers, just backyards and No Exit signs. I think once the city’s population zoomed past 600,000 they realized their plans were no longer sustainable.
