Where is your region's actual downtown?

Toronto has a downtown. Almost nowhere else in this region has one that everybody agrees on, and the disagreement is more interesting than it sounds.

Ask in Mississauga and you will get Square One, Port Credit or Streetsville, and the three answers describe three different cities. Ask in Markham and you will get Main Street Unionville, Markham Village, or the built-from-scratch Downtown Markham. Ask in Vaughan and somebody will say the Vaughan Metropolitan Centre, and somebody standing next to them will laugh, though with seventeen more towers approved there in June, they may be laughing less.

What is at stake is not sentiment. It is where a municipality puts its density, its transit money and its public space over the next twenty years. Mississauga’s answer this spring was twelve acres of city land beside Square One, with a conference centre, a hotel and a music hub on it. The question is whether a place that grew as a set of subdivisions around a highway interchange can be given a centre after the fact, or whether that is something you either have or do not.

Sources: CP24, Mississauga’s downtown plan · blogTO, seventeen towers approved at the VMC. The rest is an argument about your own town.