Mississauga Council Seeking Ideas for Downtown Revolution

You don’t get much more open an invitation than: tell us what to do with twelve acres of city-owned land sitting right in the middle of downtown. And, if you’re a long-time local, it doesn’t get much more inviting than that, either. 

Lots of ideas and lots of non-starters later, the leading plan on the table runs to a convention centre, a hotel, a rental tower, a large-scale entertainment venue and something the planning documents call a "Sky Park”, presumably in a bid to make the most of all available space – including the firmament itself. 

Consultations are set to run through to January, and the council won't formally address what comes back until the spring.

The Gap That Needs Closing

The population of Downtown Mississauga has been growing for years without much of an evolving identity to go with it outside of new residential towers. The redevelopment brief leans hard into establishing a firm sense of culture and hospitality, and fair enough, a convention centre and a five-thousand-seat venue will pull crowds. But if the city is serious about building a downtown with a profile beyond "nice apartments," it's worth asking who else wants to be sitting in those office floors once the unveiling party’s over.

Games development is a sector that needs exactly what downtown Mississauga is trying to become: density, walkability, proximity to transit and research libraries, and affordability (relative to Toronto proper that a studio can actually afford the square footage). The range of output is genuinely wide, too – easy to forget if the only reference point floating around your head is a single well-known franchise. Browse the LeoVegas casino games collection and you get a sense of the range a mature studio pipeline turns out on a rolling basis – animation, audio, interface design, math and testing all layered on top of each other. The industry is constantly demanding more from itself, and that’s just one ‘limb’ of a much broader industry that encompasses triple-A, indie, and iGaming. That's the kind of energy and creativity that needs to be physically present downtown. 

Another important market to attract is the (rapidly) growing number of AI startups, which represent a major new boon to Canada’s tech scene. In September of this year, Radical Ventures announced a venture capital fund worth billions of dollars with a view to backing Canada’s AI scaleups. Further initiatives are being announced every few months, demonstrating quite how lucrative and dynamic this new venture within the tech sector really is. 

For that kind of interest, zoning needs to suit smaller studio spaces, and fibre and power infrastructure needs to be enough to support a lot of activity round the clock in server rooms. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing you’d expect to see front and center of an artists’ rendition of a regeneration project, but it is fundamental. 

The consultation period being this long is frustrating, but it’s also a benefit. Most of the feedback tends to circle back to the same handful of amenities focused around residents. Industry tenancy rarely gets raised unprompted, which is exactly why it needs raising on purpose, in writing, before the survey window closes in January.