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How fitting. Just days after the displaced tenants of 2 Secord Ave. were finally allowed back into their highrise homes in East York after an electrical fire rendered their building temporarily uninhabitable this summer, Mayor David Miller went to Etobicoke to unveil his Tower Renewal Initiative, an ambitious plan to make the ubiquitous old highrise monoliths of the 1960s and '70s more sustainably habitable than they've ever been.

The plan is not particularly new.

Miller announced his intentions more than a year ago in New York City, and former U.S. President Bill Clinton gave the plan some juice with funding from his foundation. But the rubber has now hit the road.

Toronto's executive committee gave unanimous approval to four pilot projects that will see old highrise apartment buildings made more energy efficient with a range of retrofits - from replacing old single-pane windows to dropping a geothermal energy spike into the ground.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the explicit goal in all of this. Because in spite of what one might think, the effect of stacking households in tall structures assembled from concrete slabs is grossly inefficient.

According to a report from E.R.A. Architects and the University of Toronto, a household in a highrise is actually about 20 per cent less energy efficient than a single-family bungalow.

And being more energy efficient is a good goal for both the city, which is trying to live up to Miller's goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, and the towers' owners and tenants, who will be able to mitigate the increasing energy costs that will no doubt beset us all over the years to come.

That's all got a nice bottom-line feel: cut the greenhouse gas and the heating bill.

But the side benefit of this initiative is one most likely to be felt directly by people like those returning to Secord. At the very least, making these highrises more energy efficient will make them more liveable.

But the initiative is also opening the door to another look at the land-use planning that has given birth to these communities to begin with.

The initiative involves reconsidering the "tower in a park" model of development that linked the amount of passive greenspace around buildings to those buildings' height.

The result of this formula has meant that many highrises stand isolated from their communities and from amenities by large swathes of under-used greenspace. The initiative proposes to make it easier to find a use for that greenspace, whether as a community garden, proper recreational space or as infill retail or marketplace development.

The goal here is to turn these parks into "apartment neighbourhoods", according to the report by E.R.A. and the U of T. With a combination of privately subsidized retrofitting and land-use planning-enabled revitalization, the highrise communities of Toronto could become lively and productive hubs.

If all that comes true, it would be genuinely transformative for the city as a whole. Highrise apartments of a certain age are ubiquitous in the city, particularly in the suburbs. According to the report, there are more than a thousand of them in Toronto and many of them are the focus of the highest-need neighbourhoods in Toronto.

The city and the residents themselves can only do so much to make those communities flourish without, in at least some measure, reconsidering the urban form in which they're situated. This is not to say that every highrise community will have a flourishing marketplace swirling around its foundation, or each one will have allotment gardens spread under the balconies.

But they can all be cleaner, more efficient places that are laid out in a way to deal with the real needs and wishes of their tenants. If the mayor's tower renewal initiative can accomplish a fraction of that, it will be a success.