As feel-good an announcement as it is -- 300 jobs, $650-million investment in new machinery to build the Lexus RX300 -- Toyota's plans shed glaring light on the fact that municipalities in Waterloo Region have a few problems to solve in that neighbourhood.

Toyota sits in the middle of the hottest real estate in the region, the area surrounding the Maple Grove Road-Fountain Street hub.

If a case for a more rationalized approach to urban planning can be made, it can be made here, where decisions most immediately affect people living in Cambridge, Kitchener and Woolwich Township.

Several weeks ago, the City of Cambridge sold two large pieces of industrial land to businesses that could bring in up to 1,200 jobs. Studies predict that the Cambridge Business Park, of which Toyota is a neighbour, will employ 9,700 people, up from 2,200 in 1996. The Gateway big-box commercial centre just around the corner in Kitchener is often packed with people dropping money on lumber, frothy coffees, popcorn and movies.

Housing developments in the Breslau area and the land between Beaverdale and Speedsville roads in Cambridge may be the addresses of 2,900 to 4,500 people by 2016. Kitchener council recently backed subdivision plans that may house 11,200 in the southeast corner of the city, just across the Grand River.

These events come from decisions separately made in one municipal council or another, as if they have no relation to each other. But they do. They will affect traffic patterns, school construction, firefighting, the need for sewage disposal, the need for green space. They will blur borders.

If all of what is happening at the geographic centre of the region was contained in one municipality, surely some planner would say, "We need a community plan here.''

In a community plan, land uses complement each other by design, not accident.

That's certainly what the provincial government had in mind 30 years ago when it thought about building a community from scratch on 1,200 hectares (3,000 acres) between Preston and Breslau. The proposal, with its carefully shaped neighbourhoods, was more imaginative than its working name, New Town.

Currently, the area seems to be taking shape as a collection of independent, competing interests -- industry in Cambridge, housing in Kitchener.

It's like the cities are spoiling for a fight, and there may soon be a revival of an old one unless attitudes change.

Besides advancing the need for an $8.5-million bypass around Breslau, growth in the area will almost certainly push ahead a proposal to extend Fairway Road in Kitchener across the Grand River.

It's been a divisive issue going back more than 20 years. In the past, Cambridge has viewed the bridge as an attempt by Kitchener to extend its urban mass over the river, an outlook that is absurdly meaningless now. Because all that independent municipal decision-making is creating one community out there, sort of picking up where the province left off in the 1970s. It has industry, a shopping centre, land for housing, and it's growing -- fast.

It should be planned and treated as a shared asset. Somebody might want to think about giving it a name.