Mike Murray calls it the "big shift," and he sees it when he looks west along Kitchener’s King Street.
Old factories turned into condominiums and offices. Cranes building more. Much of it overlooking the route for a light-rail service between Kitchener and Waterloo.
"We are trying – and I think we are making some significant progress – at integrating planning and transportation infrastructure,'' says Murray, the chief administrative officer of the Region of Waterloo. "Almost nothing can exist in silos anymore. Economic development is intimately related to planning issues and infrastructure issues.''
That big shift – seeing urban living as a blend of smart thinking rather than a clutter of independent decisions – comes into focus at a two-day conference in Waterloo next week.
CityAge: The Innovation City, settles into the Centre for International Governance Innovation Auditorium Oct. 9 and 10. The Waterloo event, of which Communitech is a sponsor, is one of seven CityAge conferences held in North America within the last two years. Philadelphia hosts the eighth in November.
They draw planners, technology experts, municipal leaders, academics, artists – just about anybody with an interest in keeping growing cities functional and enjoyable. Murray is one of the speakers in Waterloo.
"The real premise underlying CityAge is that we are living under the greatest urbanization trend in human history," says Miro Cernetig, a former Globe and Mail journalist who founded CityAge Media with Marc Andrew.
Cernetig covered municipal government before his career took him to postings around the world.
"I was actually very bored by city hall," he says. "It wasn't exactly what I wanted to write about. But as I travelled, it became apparent that how we build – and rebuild – cities is actually one of the major questions of the day.
"It isn't about municipal politics, it's really about the big ideas of how you build the future."
Municipal governments, Cernetig says, have a key advantage over decision-making at the provincial or federal levels.
"It's a common theme all across the continent: Cities actually have the ability to implement a lot of solutions quickly," he says. "They may not always have the money, but they have other tools they can use, like zoning or smart planning. . ."
"So if you have a mayor with a big idea, or a community with a big idea, they can act very quickly on it."
More than 40 speakers and panelists make up the program for CityAge in Waterloo. They include Iain Klugman, Communitech's CEO, and Tom Jenkins, chairman of OpenText Corp.
Technology figures prominently in the conference's eight sessions. Topics cover such issues as using vast amounts of data (traffic counts, for example) to improve city living; how web-based information and communication have emerged as vital pieces of urban infrastructure; how universities and city governments need each other to build the new knowledge economy; and how municipalities must manage the flow of people.
Putting more cars on the road is not the solution to the last point, says Antonio Gomez-Palacio, a principal with DIALOG, an urban-design firm with offices in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver.
Gomez-Palacio gives one of the keynote addresses at the conference.
"Transit fits into the equation in an incredible way," he says. "It is a much more affordable way of moving people around. It requires less space, and ultimately requires less infrastructure than what we've been doing since (after) World War Two, which is continuously building car-dependent infrastructure."
But when it comes to comparing value, "we put a burden of proof on transit that we never hold to car-based infrastructure," Gomez-Palacio says.
Municipal leaders, he says, need to realize that transportation options – transit, cycling and walking – are important to attracting and keeping 16-to-34-year-olds, a worker cohort that is even more inclined now than it was 10 years ago to put off car ownership.
"They'd rather own a cell phone than a car," he says. "Their ticket to freedom is social media."
