The City of Vaughan has been without a downtown since its beginnings as a collection of local communities. Each of these – Concord, Kleinburg, Maple, Thornhill and Woodbridge – boasted their own set of characteristics and historic core areas.
 

Fast forward to today and Vaughan is one of fastest-growing municipalities in Canada with a population of more than 320,000, and annual building permits averaging $1 billion every year across all building types.

This incredible growth, coupled with the goal to make Vaughan a world-class city, inspired Council in 2010 to create a vision for a single downtown for the City and its five historic communities – naming it The Vaughan Metropolitan Centre (VMC). The VMC will be a vibrant, modern, dynamic urban centre for all citizens, employees, visitors and businesses that in time will become the heart of the City – economically, culturally and physically.

Over the course of the past three years, much success has been achieved on a development-by-development basis such as – the VMC Subway Station, EXPO City and the SmartCentres KPMG office development. This work, aligned with Council’s objectives, will ensure that when the subway begins operations in the next 24 to 36 months, the initial form of development is in place.

Today, staff across all commissions continues to be focused on more than 20 City-initiated projects in the VMC that are dependent on each other to varying degrees, with all having multiple sub-projects.

To ensure that Council’s vision becomes a reality, the consolidated project leadership for the VMC implementation and facilitation has been assigned to the Executive Director, Office of the City Manager.