awake (in a strange place)

Kitchener and Waterloo are twin cities. Despite being historically separate municipal areas, there is no perceivable break between them. King Street (the only street I know of with an East, West, North, and South designation) runs through them, connecting them like water does the points along river.

Something similar is happening between Kitchener and Cambridge, but there is still a big-box limbo that disrupts the kind of flow which justifies the hyphenation of Kitchener-Waterloo. Or, as I like to call it, the Kaydub.

As the fountain outside Kitchener City Hall and my office springs to life at 3:42pm on this warm Thursday, I feel as though I'm stepping out of a dream, shaking from my boots the sparkling dust of that other place... the place that could be Waterloo.

Even though there is no clear deliniation between the cities there exists an indisputible difference. They are like different neighbourhoods in the same megapolis, tethered together, pulling one another towards a shared destiny. What is it though?

Waterloo boasts two world-class universities, a globally competitive (arguable dominant) communications company (you guessed it: RIM), think tanks (one of which keeps promising to bring Stephen Hawking to town), a slough of tech start-ups, and a terrific uptown core. Kitchener is endowed with a nationally praised college, extensions of the universities' campuses, an innovative civic planning and population density strategy, an awesome farmers' market, and, well, my office.

A big part of the difference is visible at street-level. I invite you (if you live nearby) to walk the cities and see if you can't pick it out.

I woke up in Kitchener this morning (a story for another time), and walked to work. What I noticed was how few people there were and how most of them were young women with nametags on lanyards. Kitchener has fewer places for people - lots of places of and for business, but few places you can go and be around people. On the surface, it's suffering from that Canadian condition of the commuter town during and urban decay phase. It's recovering still from the early to mid-90s, when urban shopping centres everywhere sprouted plywood boards and "for lease" signs.

Unless you know where to look, Kitchener doesn't offer much in terms of livability. It's there, I'm finding, in its alternative cafes and used bookstores, amid the construction of summer, but it is not easy to find.

And therein lies the problem: its hard to find life in Kitchener. There's plenty of it, but its like lichen: sturdy and low to the ground. In my opinion, the city needs a wayfinding strategy to go along with its redesigned downtown, to promote the life that's already there to wake up, stop dreaming about Waterloo, and walk around.