Mississauga Developments

[ijmorlan]

It doesn’t need to be re-developed to fix that. Just change the ownership to the city and the status of the main corridors to being streets (closed to vehicle traffic, presumably).

Knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding without roofs spanning the spaces between the buildings seems like an overreaction.

That sounds like a fairly major expropriation to me. Malls are also climate controlled, so you'd have the city take that over?

Somehow a mall doesn't feel like a street to me. The urban design is different (and in the mall these days kind of hostile to not shopping). It's more than just the matter of a roof.

“It's more than just the matter of a roof”.

That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Different establishments can be linked by indoor walkways in ways that don’t have the downsides of a mall.

I agree that the inside of a mall doesn’t feel like a street. For one matter, the interior corridors usually connect poorly to surrounding properties — one has to walk through a huge parking lot. There are other differences as well, but I think the total lack of connection to nearby properties is the biggest issue.

As to the expropriation, I was not proposing expropriation, just pointing out that if the problem with a mall is that the “public” corridors aren’t really public, that can be changed without any construction. If a mall owner wants to “improve” it by re-building as a bunch of small separate buildings with city streets between them, why not just sell the corridors to the city for $1, leave the existing building in place, and give people climate-controlled links between stores? Not sure who would maintain the climate control. But that’s not the real point. The real point is, I want to have the option of doing all my shopping without going in and outside all the time. Given the amount of enclosed space in a typical downtown, I don’t think that is such an unreasonable desire.