Square One, my hometown's famous mall, has the power to reshape Canada's story
I’m from Mississauga – the Canadian city where the mall is the most famous place in town.
 How…sub urban.
Square One hits all the stereotypes people hold of the ‘burbs: massive food court filled with teens, shoppers laden with brand-branded bags and cars slowly circulating the parking lot.
Sure, that’s one way to tell the story.
But what if Square One isn’t just a great big mall? What if it’s also a great story about the genesis and growth of contemporary Canada?
When you step back and look at Square One’s 50-year arc, as I recently did for my new Visit Mississauga story and podcast series, We Built This City, you’ll see that Square One’s growth and expansion closely coincide with the development and diversification of the Canadian economy.
Four significant changes helped drive that growth: the liberalization of Canada’s immigration policies, which reduced barriers to immigrants from the global south; aerospace technological advancements, which lowered the cost of personal and commercial air travel; government (public) investment in national and provincial highway systems, to safely move people and goods; and rising standards of living, which made homeownership possible for a lot more people.
Square One remains Mississauga’s most prominent landmark not simply because a lot of people like to shop but because of a combination of larger regulatory, technological, economic, and social forces.
When we reframe the story of Square One, it widens our perspective and invites us to rethink the familiar. We see the big picture, not a narrow viewpoint.
That’s how we begin to create change – through the stories we tell.
But first, we must reframe how we think about stories, specifically what stories we choose to tell and how, why, where and when we tell them.
We’ve become so hyper-fixated on segmenting our messages to suit a particular audience that we’ve forgotten how to appeal to a broad audience.
Is it any wonder that after almost 20 years of subscribing to digital marketing’s niching-down dogma, we find ourselves unable to identify a shared vision for where we want to go or how to get there on any number of significant issues.
I know because I’ve reported on and led change initiatives in urban development, energy, social development, health care, arts and culture, education, technological innovation, Indigenous reconciliation and rural economic development.
It’s not that we lack ideas; we lack the shared language to express them.
To paraphrase Norma Desmond from the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, the ideas are big; it’s the stories that got small.
End note: I’m having a blast writing 50 stories that I guarantee will change how you think about Mississauga. We Built This City is a story and podcast project sponsored by Visit Mississauga to commemorate the municipality's 50th anniversary.
We just launched the podcast, produced by Podstarter Studios. You can find it here or on your favourite podcast platform. New episodes will drop every Thursday through the end of November.
Accompanying the podcast are expanded stories – 50 in total – that you’ll find on the We Built This City page.
Finally, for those who live in Mississauga, a commemorative magazine produced by the fantastic team at Gray Matter Media will be available on October 30th, just in time for the Rotary Club of Mississauga’s 50th anniversary gala.
A special shout-out to the teams at Heritage Mississauga, Museums of Mississauga, Region of Peel Archives, Mississauga Library, and Mississauga’s Legends’ Row—my fellow history nerds—who have generously shared their stories, sources, images, and connections to help me tell these stories.
Hi Lisa, I’ll be looking for someone to get my a copy of that commemorative magazine for sure. I was a child growing up in Port Credit when it became part of Mississauga. I attended the Erindale Campus U of T for part of my degree. I remember standing in line for hours at Square One to see the first Star Wars movie. I articled for my CA with the Mississauga office of Price Waterhouse on Robert Speck Pkwy right beside Square One. There were still farmers fields in the surrounding area. Hard to believe. I car rallied all over Mississauga once upon a time. Boy, do I know Mississauga and Square One.