The Cooksville platform invited residents of this established Mississauga neighbourhood to share their perspectives on community priorities and neighbourhood change. As a mixed-density area with growing commercial corridors, Cooksville offered a unique context for exploring how residents understand and value the principles of complete communities, and what residential intensification and transit-oriented development could mean for a neighbourhood already navigating growth pressures.

To analyse the neighbourhood, we used natural language processing in combination with Environics Analytics Opticks Numeris data and posts queried from Reddit related to Cooksville and development. This allowed Digital Public Square to get an aggregate picture of people’s opinions around development intensification in Cooksville.

Respondents from Cooksville feel notably less safe and welcome than the other two neighbourhoods, with a near 25% difference in respondents who generally feel safe. Just over a quarter of respondents only sometimes feel safe, 2.5x higher than the other two neighbourhoods. Kitsilano and Northfield are comparable, with Kitsilano feeling slightly safer than Northfield.

Safety, cleanliness, and aesthetics— like greenery, parks, and cleanup— were all tightly linked in how residents evaluated their neighbourhood and were widely agreed upon. Conversely, discussions around transportation modes and infrastructure—i.e. cycling versus transit, density and development, and the perception of unhoused people were more polarizing topics.

Sentiments towards the benefits of densification were mixed both in the qualitative insights, and through quantitative insights. Respondents tend to express cautioned openness to densification or development if key issues were addressed first, such as infrastructure (public transit vs. roads vs. bike lanes), safety and cleanliness.

Future work should explore trust-building to increase community confidence in the benefits that can come with transit oriented development (TOD).

Through this pilot experiment, it is demonstrably clear that digital tools can be a functionally efficient way to engage with local residents, particularly in capturing voices that may not typically surface through traditional community consultation. The inclusion of an open-text community poll alongside quantitative measures proved valuable in surfacing the root causes of anxieties around neighbourhood change, and in showing that residents are willing to engage meaningfully online, even with many competing online priorities.

Moving forward, larger quantities of high-quality public engagement can be reached with a longer timespan of collection, more effective use of targeted ads across additional social media platforms, and coordinating digital engagement with traditional engagement methods like in-person consultations. These can all serve to further close the gap between the public's voice and collective action on the issues that matter most to local residents.