A conference centre, hotel and music hub beside Square One. Is that a downtown?

Mississauga has spent forty years insisting that Square One’s parking lots are a downtown, and about ten of them actually building one: the Living Arts Centre, Celebration Square, Sheridan’s campus, the towers along Burnhamthorpe, and now an LRT down Hurontario.

In March council added the biggest piece since the square. On twelve acres of city-owned land along Princess Royal Drive near Burnhamthorpe and Confederation, the plan the city calls once-in-a-generation puts a 500,000-square-foot conference centre, a 400-room hotel, a purpose-built music hub, a nine-storey office building and a 20-storey purpose-built rental block with retail at the base. The vote was unanimous.

It is the kind of thing a real downtown has, which is the argument for it. It is also the kind of thing you build when you are not sure people will come on their own, which is the argument against. The people who will settle it are the ones who decide, on a Saturday night, whether to go there.

Sources: CP24, a once-in-a-generation transformation · City of Mississauga, the downtown vision