Sometimes a building project can provoke fundamental questions about how we live and work. With Connecting Cooksville, a mixed-use development in Mississauga, there are two. One: How do we house the millions of people flowing into the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area? Two: How do we design a new place, amid car-oriented suburbs, that actually feels like a city?
Connecting Cooksville – led by SvN Architects for the developers TAS – serves up excellent answers to those questions. It suggests a dense, mixed-use neighbourhood with robust transit, organized around community facilities, public plazas and a lush little forest.
Markham
Vaughan
Toronto
Brampton
Mississauga
Site
0
6
KM
0
100
Low, mid and high rise residential
m
Rail line
Low rise
residential
Hurontario St
John St
Cooksville
GO Station
SITE
Hillcrest Ave
GO Access Rd
T.L. Kennedy
Secondary
School
High rise
residential
Confederation Pkwy
Sgt. David
Yakichuk Park
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS; GOOGLE; SvN ARCHITECTS + PLANNERS
Markham
Vaughan
Toronto
Brampton
Mississauga
Site
0
6
KM
0
100
Low, mid and high rise residential
m
Rail line
Low rise
residential
John St
Hurontario St
Cooksville
GO Station
SITE
Hillcrest Ave
GO Access Rd
T.L. Kennedy
Secondary
School
High rise
residential
Confederation Pkwy
Sgt. David
Yakichuk Park
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS; GOOGLE; SvN ARCHITECTS + PLANNERS
0
100
Kirwin Ave
Low, mid and high rise residential
m
Low rise
residential
Rail line
John St
Hurontario St
Cooksville
GO Station
SITE
Hillcrest Ave
Commercial
GO Access Rd
T.L. Kennedy
Secondary
School
High rise
residential
Markham
Vaughan
Toronto
Brampton
Confederation Pkwy
Mississauga
Sgt. David
Yakichuk Park
0
6
Site
KM
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS;
GOOGLE; SvN ARCHITECTS + PLANNERS
But whether this vision is going to get built is in question.
Let’s begin where the important things happen, at street level. Here, the development scheme proposes something very rare in suburban Canada: good quality public space. The site is two hectares at the corner of Hurontario and Hillcrest, major arteries through the city of Mississauga. “We want this project to be a model, by focusing on the public realm and public amenities,” says Sam Dufaux, design director at the architecture firm SvN.
The plan calls for five separate towers, all to the outer edges of the block. The designers have tried, as much as possible, to keep private cars and delivery vehicles out of this zone. Instead of streets, the centre of the block is drawn as a publicly accessible plaza for pedestrians, lined by shops, a new public library and a new public recreation centre.
This central idea – keep the cars out – is both obvious and radical. The urban design consensus in Canadian municipalities often calls for a focus on public streets as the zones of public life. The problem is that when the streets are roaring eight-lane traffic sewers, as is the case with Hurontario, nobody will take pleasure in walking there or sitting with a cappuccino.
The SvN design follows through on this insight with rigorous execution. About 90 per cent of the buildings’ ground floors will have public or commercial activity, including small shops set aside for local entrepreneurs. Thus these open spaces will be “activated,” to use planning jargon, by people walking and rolling through them. Many of those people will be heading to the adjacent GO Transit Cooksville station, to and from the future LRT line on Hurontario Street or from the existing MiWay buses on nearby Dundas Street.
This provides a rare opportunity to deliver a place that is actually pleasant to explore without a car. That is vanishingly, shockingly rare among large suburban developments in Canada, where the ground level is typically dominated by cars and half-baked public space.
The developers are serious about that goal of delivering a 15-minute city, where all daily amenities are at hand, says Mazyar Mortazavi, chief executive officer of TAS. “We have to look at the ground plane as an amenity for the community,” he says, “and that includes those living within the new buildings and those around them.”
The landscape architecture here is also notable: It promises to be forest with a diversity of species and a real, functioning ecosystem. Mark Thomann, a landscape architect with the prominent American firm WHY Architecture, explains the plantings will emulate the kind of ecosystem that would exist here if it was not, at the moment, a giant parking lot. “Think of all the reasons people want to go out into a forest,” he says, “for contact with nature, for learning, for relaxation. How could all that cycle happen in an urban development where you’re watching that forest grow?”
In short, this design promises many unusual things. If TAS delivers – or comes close – the result could be a new neighbourhood of remarkable design quality, a place where people can live, shop, hang out beneath some poplars and catch a train to work.
However, there are challenges. The project now relies on tall buildings between 34 and 46 storeys, which allow TAS to make its financial return while leaving lots of open space. But Mississauga city policy (in the form of recently passed official plan amendments) limits building heights to 30 storeys. To meet that limit, the development team will need to make the towers shorter and squatter and their bases chunkier. This would certainly produce a worse result for both residents and visitors.
Why is the city set on that policy? Mississauga is focusing its downtown two kilometres from here at Square One mall, which has been a centre of high-rise growth since the eighties. In that zone – which is near a major highway, with mediocre transit – the city allows unlimited heights.
Connecting Cooksville's plans call for five separate towers, all to the outer edges of the block.Norm Li
But at Cooksville, residents are much more likely to take transit. The Ontario government recently introduced a new policy that sets density targets around Major Transit Station Areas such as the Cooksville GO Station.
The city says, basically, it doesn’t need taller buildings here to meet the province’s mandate. “The proposed building heights [in city plans] can easily accommodate the city and region’s planned density target,” spokesperson Irene McCutcheon said, noting that their target is double the specific provincial requirement.
But why does the city only want a bare minimum of development that’s relatively green? Mr. Dufaux and his colleagues at SvN are outspoken advocates for climate action, and he makes a strong argument that density – including right here – is the right policy move. “Ontario could grow by four million people by 2043,” he says, citing a recent projection by Statistics Canada, “and where are they going to go?” Combine that with Canada’s commitment to cut emissions to net zero by 2050, he says, “and intensification is the only way. We need very big change.”
These are statements of fact. People simply need to live closer together and drive less, relying much more on mass transit. Yet this insight is not reflected in the policies of Ontario, which continue to direct much of the growth in the Toronto region to its suburban edges and beyond. And it is not reflected in local policies in cities such as Toronto, or Mississauga. “There is a real disconnect between our high-level goals as a society,” Mr. Dufaux says, “and the regulations that govern what we actually build.”
For instance: parking regulations. For now, the Cooksville project is being designed with five levels of underground parking to meet city policies.
Of course, Mr. Dufaux is talking up his project. But the arguments are unimpeachable: Fast-growing Ontario needs to build a lot of housing for a lot of people, near mass transit. Most of it is not going to be this liveable or this beautiful. Hopefully Mississauga will focus its efforts on getting all of the Cooksville project’s promised public amenities, and insisting on all that beautiful design with more people and less parking.