Photo: Communitech CEO Iain Klugman took part in a panel on partnerships at the CityAge conference in Waterloo Thursday.
Apps and devices can do amazing things, but nobody’s come up with anything as disruptive as the weather, a conference in Waterloo heard Thursday.
“If I’m a company, and you can’t keep me (operating) because of floods or whatever, I’m going,” said panelist John Fahey, pointing to retention as a reason why municipalities need to invest in safeguards against weather-related events.
Municipal resiliency was among the topics that concluded CityAge: The Innovation City, a two-day conference in Waterloo. CityAge examined issues facing growing urban areas.
Communitech helped sponsor the event, held at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. CityAge co-founders Marc Andrew and Miro Cernetig said Thursday they will bring the conference back to the area in some format next year.
A principal with Golder Associates, an engineering firm, Fahey joined three other panelists to discuss resiliency. Panelists said those municipalities that invest in weather readiness will enjoy a competitive edge over those who don’t.
Doing it really well may be a business opportunity, said Daniel Hoornweg, research chair at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.
The panel pointed to major floods in Toronto and Calgary among world events indicating climate change. Flooding isn’t the only concern.
Business and citizens, the panel said, want a power system that has up-to-date technology to manage -- even prevent -- sudden outages.
Flood-control and power-grid investments are expensive, but Hoornweg, who is also Ontario’s chief safety and risk officer, said Toronto and its neighbours in the Greater Golden Horseshoe already have measures they can showcase.
“At the end of the day, it’s going to cost money, but let’s make some money while we’re doing it,” he said.
In the meantime, said Jason Thistlethwaite, reducing pavement and disconnecting downspouts from sewer systems would allow the ground to do its job -- absorb water.
Municipalities could mine digital information collected every day to identify flood-prone neighbourhoods and come up with solutions, said Thistlethwaite, who heads the Climate Change Adaptation Project at the University of Waterloo.
CityAge looked at two other topics Thursday: The importance of partnerships, and the changing picture of manufacturing.
Often overshadowed by the technology developments in Waterloo Region’s knowledge economy, manufacturing still has heft.
Three-dimensional (3D) printing -- making objects out of fine layers of plastic or metal -- could be a positive disruptive influence. The printers are small, turn out prototypes and functioning parts, and save time and money that would have been expended on higher-cost machining.
“I don't think it is necessarily a magic pill that will solve a lot of issues, but there are specific cases where it will bring high value," Clint Carter of Christie Digital Systems Inc. said in an interview after appearing as a CityAge panelist.
Christie set up its Hyphen division to meet its own needs for 3D printing, and offer services to the business community, said Carter, Christie’s senior director of global manufacturing.
Mark Derro, dean of the school of media and design at Conestoga College, said manufacturing in Canada will have 326,000 jobs to fill by 2025.
“We have the engines and the capacity, but there are huge challenges in getting people to go into it in the first place,” he said.
The last panel of the conference determined that how well cities perform as they grow depends on the partnerships they build with the arts, businesses, schools and other groups.
Smart partnerships, as described by the panel, assume risk, communicate well, pick a leader and feed off a little disruptive thinking.
“The right approach should be a battle of ideas,’’ said Iain Klugman, president and chief executive officer of Communitech. “You put ideas on the table and let the best ones win.”
