who's our city?

Now that I write about Waterloo and live here (I recently moved from Guelph - can you tell?), I find myself wondering about the identity of the city. I'm not sure if it's the same pursuit as trying to find a Canadian identity; I'm not trying to determine what a person from Waterloo is like based on where they live, rather I want to understand the city itself as a character.

How to approach this query is kind of tricky. Stats and demographies (as much as I adore them...) aren't going to do the trick, since what I'm after can't be expressed as a graph. No, I'm after the zeitgeist of the town: what makes it what it is? Vague, I know.

As I get to know the place a little more intimately - I take transit to work, walk to shop or play (frisbee in Waterloo Park after work, anyone?), and explore via velo (aka bicycle for the uninitiated) when the weather allows - I realise that the people and the cityscape have a symbiotic relationship. Here's what I mean:

it's not just that the people who live here make the city; the city makes them, too. It's difficult for someone who hasn't lived here long to internalise the geography because we won't necessarily have the language we'd need to think about, let alone describe, where something is in relation to anything else.

The fortunate thing about Waterloo, though, is that there is a section in Uptown with several large structures that serve as major guideposts. I'm thinking of places like the Perimetre Institute, CIGI (formerly the Seagram Museum), and the new civic square and Bell sculpture (yes, it's a bell). I'm not sure if these full-stops in the landscape grammar of Waterloo were planned or are just kismet, but they go a long way in establishing a large-scale syntax of place that assists in way-finding as well as forming a visual identity for the city.

There's more to it, of course. The revival of pedestrian culture in KW, a community whose emphasis on high-density population will have more significant affects on the psychology of its denizens than we might realize, presents us with an opportunity to build a city with a very unique character ineed. Think-tanks are great, but I've yet to see a real municipal strategy to develop Waterloo as a place with history and a plan for the future; and Kitchener to a lesser extent if that's possible.

As these twin cities reinvent themselves from the ashes of the industries that made them, will infrastructure spending go into more concrete features and branded green-space, or will the actual heritage of the area be allowed to come through into a "genuine" and organic metropolis?