If you lived here you would be home by now.

How I learned to stop worrying and not dislike Mississauga.

A small confession – I haven’t technically moved to Toronto. I’m about 25 miles southwest of Toronto, in a city called Mississauga, part of the Greater Toronto Area.

And for somebody who has just landed from England in the past week, it may as well be Neptune.

Take a look at this:

View larger map

The satellite view above is of the city. I invite you to scroll around the map for a bit. See if you can find the centre.

Guess what? It was right there. The centre – Square One – is the big thing in the bottom right that looks like the overflow car park for the USS Enterprise. It’s a huge shopping centre, just off the freeway. As you can see, there’s little pedestrian access, though there is a bus station in there somewhere.

Mississauga, ON has a population of 668,549 souls, and in the late 1980s, was the fastest-growing city in the whole of North America. Despite this, few people have really heard of Mississauga, other than as the birthplace of All Saints member Natalie Appleton. Even Wolfram Alpha is a bit nonplussed.

To properly get a feel to what life in the city of Mississauga is like, though, you’ll need to start pounding the mean city streets. Here is a typical residential street about 15 minutes’ walk from the area I’m living in. (These don’t show my address, identity theft fans, so you can put that photocopier away this instant.)

1. This mailbox contains about 40 pigeonholes and there is one for each house in the vicinity. You’d normally drive up, unlock the box, and collect your post, instead having it delivered through a letterbox to your door.
2. Empty sidewalk. The only person about on foot in the middle of the day is me, and somebody walking a dog.
3. All these trees are the same type and height – meaning they were all planted at the same time as saplings.
4. Two garages?
5. Five lanes! (The central lane is used for turning left or occasional naughty overtaking)

6. This streetlight is pointing at the road, not the sidewalk.
7. The speed limit on this road is 60kph (38mph). In practice, people drive up to 10kph faster than the speed limit without getting caught. So, that’s a maximum 70kph (44mph). On five lanes. This is the same layout as the road I have to stagger across to buy tea.
8. Fire hydrants, which here are about six metres apart. You can’t park three metres either side of a fire hydrant, so this effectively means no parking. No problem, use one of your garages instead.
9. Again, all these trees are the same size, but what you might also notice is that all the houses behind them are identical.

We can conclude several things from this – that everything is set up for cars, rather than pedestrians, that nothing is older than 25 years and has all been built at the same time, and that the sky on a spring day is really high and blue in Canada. (To be fair, while this area is residential and the road is busy, it’s only technically so because there is no mall. Quieter branches lie off the side that have two lane traffic and places for children to play.)

I’ve visited Mississauga before, several times. I used to really not like it here. There seems to be something not quite human about a city and a place to live where you don’t pass people on the street. You can’t stop for a chat with your friend down the road if you’re going at 65kph in the middle lane.

The lack of public commercial space also bothers me. If a private company, such as a mall owner, runs the area where you eat and shop, then they have a say who gets in and out – both people, and shops. It doesn’t engender spontaneity. In fact, most of the places to shop and eat are box stores or malls, and are all invariably chains surrounded by – you guessed it, car parks and five-lane highways.

It’s utterly different to London, where you can wander out of the door, down the high street and into a corner shop. This is because during its massive period of expansion in the 1980s, the whole city squirted grids and blocks all across the farmland to the west of Toronto. Houses all from identical blueprints appeared, dotted with the odd big box store and car park. And everyone has a car. I don’t drive, so popping down to the coffee shop involves a 25-minute walk down a busy road and a 10-minute trek across a windy car park into a mall.

Like I said, this may as well be Neptune.

The mayor of Mississauga is Hazel McCallion. She is 88 years old. In the video above, Rick Mercer, Canada’s emulation of Jon Stewart, interviews her and it all gets very maple-flaggy. Most of the opening shots of the city are of freeways and cars. (But there is a bus.) It’s interesting that she says that her one regret during her 31-year tenure is public transport.

I’ve now been here for just about over a week. I’ve managed to get around ok – a bus from a stop 15 minutes’ walk away, every hour, takes one hour to get into Toronto. And I now think places like Mississauga, which have been built in haste to house an expanding population, have a role to play.

I suppose it comes down to what you expect. You can live very well here for not too much money. You can have mind-boggling amounts of space, a garden, multiple garages, good schools and reasonably good access to the comforts of life, if not excitement or élan. And there are villages within Mississauga that the urban sprawl swallowed up but are still communities structured in a way recognizable to Europeans: Port Credit and Streetsville, for instance.

And while Mississauga is still not for me, and we’re going to move downtown in a few months when we get all our Canada geese in a row, it’ll do for now.

Still, I’m not sure how sustainable in the long-term a community built around four wheels and a gearbox is, and I know that this holds true for similar places in North America. I don’t think in the field of human history anything like this has ever been tried. Even nomadic communities still all travel together and can chat to one another on their camels.

You know, Mississauga is strange, like a city – well, in fact, it is a city. It just doesn’t have all of the things one would normally associate with a city – people walking around outside, nasty smells, outdoor cafés, buskers, and so on. Despite this, it’s still got its own businesses and residents who live and work there. Mississauga’s almost like a sub-city. A sub-urban environment, if you will.

Hmm. ‘Sub-urban’. That’s quite a nice phrase I coined just there. Wonder if it’ll catch on?

Mississauga links

Webcam of City Hall
Streetsville Bread & Honey festival
John Sewell, author of The Shape of the Suburbs: Understanding Toronto’s Urban Sprawl