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The Canadian Institute of Planners has recognized the Mississauga Brightwater Waterfront Master Plan (“Brightwater”) with an Award of Planning Merit in the Healthy Communities category. Brightwater represents the culmination of over ten years of collaborative planning and design, to remediate the highly contaminated 72-acre Imperial Oil site along Mississauga’s central waterfront.

The jury’s comments:

The jury members commended Mississauga Brightwater Waterfront Master Plan for its emphasis on creating a Healthy Communities Charter to guide its work. Embedded are nine planning principles to support a vibrant, healthy urban community: regenerate a brownfield site, implement the vision of inspiration of Port Credit, deliver a waterfront campus experience, provide a varied public realm experience, re-establish connections to Mississauga’s waterfront, achieve a sensitive neighbourhood transition, deliver a range of housing types and tenures, provide diverse retail and commercial opportunities, and establish a fine-grain street and block structure. The charter was founded and complemented by the principles of Low Impact Development, criteria for LEED certification for various buildings, Energy Star Certification, geothermal energy and photovoltaic cells, and the One Planet Living Sustainability framework.

Extensive use of graphics, icons, infographics, and colour to tie together different portions of the master plan, as well as clear action-oriented language, created ease of use for all audiences. The economically viable site remediation strategy that organized land uses, built form, density and open space according to existing conditions constituted the innovative side of the project. Improvements through the design, objectives, and implementation were made throughout the entire public engagement process to address concerns related to open space, land use, programing, built form, and urban design. The partnership between the local and regional governments and agencies made these community improvements possible.

Overall, the project delivered on a series of objectives for a Healthy City, defined as “one that is continually creating and improving those physical and social environments and expanding those community resources, which enable people to mutually support each other in performing all the functions of life and in developing to their maximum potential,” (WHO definition of a Healthy City, 1998).

The plan establishes a long-term redevelopment plan for a healthy, livable, and sustainable community and represents innovation in healthy community planning through the creation of a Healthy Communities Charter to guide the project, and an economically viable site remediation strategy that organized land uses, built form, density, and open space according to existing conditions. The design continuously evolved and improved through partnerships between local and regional governments and agencies. View the plan online.

When complete, Brightwater will emphasize low carbon living, promote social, environmental, and economic sustainability, and
deliver public and cultural amenities to strengthen a sense of community and belonging. The Master Plan promotes a built environment that will deliver a diverse range of housing opportunities, affordable housing, a mix of retail, commercial, and institutional uses, and an array of public spaces including an innovative campus space at the waterfront and a waterfront park that defines Mississauga’s waterfront edge.

Read more about this project here.

Concept image of the Mississauga Brightwater Waterfront Master Plan

Image courtesy of Urban Strategies Inc.

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