Sixteen years after Mississauga’s shoreline-blocking Lakeview coal plant was shuttered to reduce emissions, the lakefront site is poised to be reincarnated as a 15-minute city.
The Lakeview Generating Station—a misnamed behemoth that physically blocked access to Lake Ontario and regularly generated view-killing smog—could easily have been retooled as a gas-fired power plant, “but people in the community pushed for more,” writes Fast Company.
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Now, four years after the city put out an open bid to buy the 71-hectare/177-acre site, the coalition of companies that won the bid (headed by Argo Development Corporation) has secured city approval for the design of its 15-minute city, Lakeview Village.
Centred on the principle that “people should live within a 15-minute walk or bike ride from most of their daily errands,” explains Fast Company, the new development is not meant to become a bedroom community of Toronto. “A new innovation district on the site plans to create 9,000 local jobs, so many people living in the new neighborhood’s 8,000 housing units can walk only blocks to work.”
The developers are considering a district heating system that would use waste heat from a wastewater treatment plant, as well as an “automated trash collection system that sucks recycling, compostables, and trash into an underground pipe that leads to a central facility.”
Based on a design the developers witnessed in Sweden, the system “helps keep streets cleaner and plastic trash out of the water, since the outdoor bins in park areas can automatically empty themselves when full.”
While the site “may take 10 to 15 years to fully develop and transform,” Fast Company adds, it could be ready for initial occupancy as early as 2025.
