Nestled between the vibrant urban cores of downtown Kitchener and uptown Waterloo is a stretch of road without an identity.

Aside from Grand River Hospital and Sun Life Financial, the two-kilometre section of King Street from John Street in Waterloo to Victoria Street in Kitchener is characterized by parked cars, fast food joints, mom-and-pop shops and a sea of pavement.

That perception may be about to change, however, thanks to the impending arrival of the light rail transit system and the associated new development expected for King Street and adjacent streets. Some might say the area is poised to emerge as one of the region’s most interesting locales.

Welcome to Midtown.

From regional staff to design consultants, no one knows for certain where the term originated.

But Ryan Mounsey, a development planner and urban designer with the City of Waterloo, said the term has been used for almost a decade.

Mounsey worked as a senior planner with the City of Kitchener until 2007, along with Cory Bluhm, the manager of downtown community development. He says the concept of midtown was used as a guiding principle for the Sun Life Financial building and the surrounding urban area as far back as 2004. The term even appears in Kitchener’s urban design manual, approved in 2010.

“I’m not sure (the term midtown) exists officially,” said George Dark, an urban designer with Urban Strategies Inc. His firm has been working on the Community Building Strategy and central transit corridor for more than a year, and said the idea likely came up during that workshop.

“What’s interesting about it is, it’s a place that exists in both cities, and only exists if you combine the territories of both,” Dark added.

Some of the goals of the Community Building Strategy are to help foster future investment, enhance mobility and create quality urban spaces adjacent to the $818-million transit system that will, eventually, run right through midtown.

The concept may be new for Waterloo Region, but historically midtowns have been among the most important areas of growing cities. Midtown Toronto is home to many of the city’s most sought-after neighbourhoods, and midtown Manhattan has some of New York City’s most iconic elements, including the Empire State Building, Times Square and Rockefeller Centre.

That’s not to say Kitchener and Waterloo’s midtown will necessarily grow to those lofty heights, but it demonstrates how these areas can develop an identity separate from their established cores, and still remain linked.

Dark said some key characteristics of this region’s midtown area will be access to public transit through the LRT, scheduled to start running in 2017, access to high-quality jobs, more intense residential development with six- or eight-storey mixed-use apartments that are within walking or cycling distance of both city cores, and respect for the established neighbourhoods that have been there for decades.

“Functionally and physically, it’s very different from the two established cores,” Dark said.

Rob Horne, commissioner of planning, housing and community services for the Region of Waterloo, said the term “midtown” does not exist in any formal documentation, but it does reflect the goals of the region.

“I honestly think it hasn’t been used because we have two cities and it’s a matter of respecting each other’s cores,” said Horne. “It really, to me, is another expression of the transit corridor. I think we’ve not been using the term, but applying the concept.”

The idea was raised again last week during a City of Waterloo televised council session when, speaking in favour of a proposed six-storey mixed-use apartment on King Street, Chris Klein of the TriCities Transport Action Group uttered the phrase. Councillors seized on the idea and expressed great interest in the concept, but Klein said he couldn’t take credit for coining the term.

“As soon as you hear it, it’s kind of obvious,” he said.

By Heather Abrey
Kitchener Post staff

It may only be their first year, but the Waterloo Mini Maker Faire is set to rival similar events in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa.

So far the event has attracted 50 vendors, about equal to Toronto and surpassing Montreal and Ottawa.

The Maker Faire is being largely organized by members of Kwartzlab — a maker space on Charles Street in Kitchener, with help from DIYode, a maker space in Guelph.

“Kwartzlab is basically a social club for creative people who make things; it’s a maker space,” said Doug Moen, a Kwartzlab member and one of the organizers. “A maker is a creative person who makes things, and we define that in kind of a broad sense. We have artists, we have crafters, we have robot builders, we have people who are doing digital fabrication on 3D printers.”

And that spirit of openness has extended to the maker faire, where there will be a host of different makers showing their projects, and some selling them.

“We’re bringing together a wide range of people from various backgrounds, skills and abilities. And the whole point of the faire is kind of to show off do-it-yourself culture,” said Jaymis Goertz, another Kwartzlab member and the person who first brought forward the idea of a local Maker Faire while spitballing on Twitter.

“People have various interests and passions and hobbies and they’d like to have an opportunity to talk about them and share them. So the faire is the perfect opportunity for them to do that.”

There will be the usual crafty fare: soaps, jewelry and the like. But beyond that, there will be unique demonstrations and vendors on site from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

One person will be making armour in a forge outside city hall, another will be allowing volunteers to control fireballs using their thoughts. There will be people who make, demonstrate and sell 3D printers, those who make robots and some who focus on sustainable living.

“We try not to be picky about who comes,” said Goertz.

“As long as you have that do-it-yourself attitude and you make stuff, we love you and we want you to come on out and share your secrets with us.”

The variety means the event is also kid-friendly, with several workshops scheduled to entertain.

Kids will have the opporunity to make their own swords, create pom poms, make circuits using play-doh, do basic soldering and much more.

After 6 p.m. there will be live music including Binary Forest and Schema Factor.

This is the first-ever Maker Faire in Waterloo Region, and Goertz says it will be an annual event.

“This is our first year and we’re expecting a good turn out. We got 50 tables — exactly what we were aiming for,” he said.

“We’re going to grow every year. Bigger and better.”

There are certain things that other Maker Faires have had that Goertz would like to add in future years, such as Power Wheel racing.

Power Wheels, that old but continually popular toy, get souped up within a certain set of parameters, then raced.

And while the faire will have a pyrokinesis booth, allowing participants to control fire with their thoughts, there is a $15,000  fire show that just wasn’t feasible.

“It isn’t quite within the budget this year. It’s one of those things, again, that would be awesome to do in a year or two. When we have $15,000 to spend on fire.”

For more information on the Waterloo Mini Maker Faire visit

www.makerfairewaterloo.com or e-mail info@makerfairewaterloo.com.

For more information about Kwartzlab visit www.kwartzlab.ca.

habrey@kitchenerpost.ca

Waterloo Mini Maker Faire

Saturday, June 15
Kitchener City Hall,
200 King St. W.

10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Maker displays

11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Workshops and talks

6 p.m. onwards
Live music

By Heather Abrey
Kitchener Post staff

Technology is an increasingly large part of daily life. Women buy tech, use tech, but have little presence in designing it.

Hard technology fields like programming are still dominated by men, and rectifying that imbalance starts young.

Two local women in tech both say they became interested early — Natalie Silvanovich, who works in computer securities for BlackBerry, and Terre Chartrand, who has been involved in different areas of tech, from creating websites to programming to teaching.

Silvanovich spends her days hacking — looking for weaknesses in programs so they can be fixed before they are exploited by others.

She first became interested in science and technology at a young age and found support in both her parents and teachers.

“My parents were very supportive. Probably drove me to so many science-related things that they were sick of it,” she said.

Teachers were also encouraging, ensuring that she entered any science, math or tech competitions that came up, and making sure she had everything she needed to succeed.

“I did a science fair project in Grade 12 that’s actually related to the field I’m in now — computer security. That was something that got me really interested in that specifically,” Silvanovich said.

She took a broad approach to science and tech throughout high school and university. It wasn’t until she went through several co-op placements after university that she figured out what she wanted to do.

Chartrand also became interested in tech at a young age and was supported by her parents, but found the lack of female role models in the late ’70s and early ’80s to be a problem.

“I magically became interested in electronics at the age of five, when I discovered that there was cooler stuff than Lego that could make things move or could make lights go on or could make a noise,” she said.

At seven years old she built an AM radio out of a bread box and some circuitry.

Her chemist mother and economist father, who later became a stay-at-home mother and vice principal respectively, supported the pursuit and never enforced traditional gender roles.

Deeply bored with the curriculum at school, Chartrand failed computer science in secondary school.

“In hindsight, it makes sense. Back then it was certainly a bit of a knock, and I thought that I should never do anything technical after that,” she said. “My interest in math disappeared, like it does for most young girls, and certainly no one encouraged me to continue in any of these areas, except for my parents.”

With a lack of role models in hard tech, Chartrand’s desire to make things was often funnelled into art.

“Overall, the levels of discouragement came from not having any models, and also from my peers, who would make fun of some of my more tomboy qualities,” she said.

“And, of course, without any models it’s not like I could prove to them that there were fabulous women doing amazing things.”

Societal role models for girls are usually women in nurturing roles, which can include things like medicine, but rarely anything in hard technology, according to Chartrand.

“If there are problems, one of them is that we don’t recognize women’s contributions, and when we do, we masculinize them. We don’t recognize them as a woman,” she said. “One of them is Ada Lovelace, who has been thoroughly

masculinized by modern culture, insomuch that she’s barely a woman in most people’s frames of reference for her. And she’s the person that invented the algorithm as it pertains to machines.”

In addition, early programming languages invented during the Second World War were created by women, for women.

“For some reason or another, we choose to remember some people over others, and in those choices that we make, we don’t choose to remember women,”  Chartrand said.

While shifts in society could take a long time, some school boards are making an effort to prevent the imbalance before it begins.

“The difficulty with girls in technology is just, more a lack of awareness than anything,” said Robert Holowack, a technological studies consultant with the Waterloo Catholic District School Board (WCDSB).

“There are two ways to approach a problem: either you try to fix it once it’s a problem or you try and do something so it doesn’t become a problem. We’re kind of going at it both ways.”

Holowack is helping to develop technology studies at the Grade 6 to 8 level.

“At that level there’s less predetermined this is what girls do, this is what boys do,” he said.

The board is integrating technology into the science curriculum, and helping to better equip teachers, many of whom are women, to demonstrate technology uses.

“So the girls in the class all of a sudden see a female teacher as being adept at doing this. So, to facilitate that we’ve been offering workshops for teachers at the Grade 6 to 8 level on technology,” he said.

The board also offers online resources and supports for teachers, who may not be naturals in the field. Instructional videos and materials intentionally feature two teenage girls.

The addition of tech to the curriculum has so far focused largely on hardware, according to Holowack, but the board is now working on adding programming and digital electronics to the arsenal.

Students will use a program called Scratch to learn the basics of programming, as well as Little Bits, which are electronic modules that snap together to form digital circuitry.

Many of these skills could be taught to even younger children, but the curriculum mandate by the Ministry of Education makes it difficult to fit in, according to Holowack.

Another barrier is the comfort level of instructors.

“That Scratch program could easily go younger. You could move the skill set down farther so that they’re more skilled and can move into other programming later on,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s so much the students, it’s acclimatizing the teachers to the idea. Elementary school is very literacy, numeracy focused, so it’s difficult to carve out time in that.”

For girls, interest in math and technology often dips around middle school, so high school students may already have ingrained notions about what they can and can’t do.

To try and combat those preconceived notions, the board is trying to illuminate all the options, firstly, by modifying the career studies class.

“What we found was that there was a high-level of inconsistency throughout the school board. So what we did was brought teachers together over two summers and we rewrote that program,” said Holowack.

Students get an overview of a variety of different jobs, then do an interest inventory that provides a list of potential careers matching their skills and interests.

Once students choose an area of interest, the school board tries to set up experiences outside the classroom.

This year, students in the specialist high-skills major program had the opportunity to visit the Tannery, and see how different companies operate. There were three categories that participated — business, information communication technology, and arts and culture. The public school board also sent students to the event.

“When we approached the companies [at the Tannery], many of them are interested in arts and culture students, because they’re saying, ‘we need creative, fresh ideas,’ and they’re looking at arts and culture perhaps to do that.

“When you’re creating computer programs, as much as coding, there’s just as much work in the graphical interface and determining what your users need,” said Holowack.

“Our hope with this is a lot of the females that come in with a predetermined idea of what they’re interested in will see a whole new level of opportunities that are available to them.”

Both school boards also participate in various skills competitions. About half of the students that attend are girls, but Holowack said many of the included fields are more traditionally female.

“I think you’re still seeing, in the more male-dominated areas, you’re still seeing mostly males, but it at least gets them all out at the same venue and they’re seeing the possibilities,” he said.

Chartrand, who at one point taught computer science in a high school, said that many tech projects don’t appeal to girls, and that there is no “attractive prototype” for them.

She referenced a project at Stanford as a prototype that attracts girls through more traditional interests, but teaches them about tech at the same time.

The girls used arduinos — easily programmable micro-controllers — to control lights and other functions in a dollhouse.

“They had girls doing some pretty hefty coding and also soldering circuits and hefty hardware stuff, but building something that is an attractive prototype,” Chartrand said.

“We have all these games that are built around girls building avatars and social existences. So, make your own cute little squee character and insert her into this space where she’s going to make friends or not. We groom them for popularity and those types of things.

“But what if a part of earning your way into that very cool space was that a part of your fashion show was programming the platform of the fashion show itself?

“I think it’s easier to change the prototype than society itself.”

habrey@kitchenerpost.ca

Check  next week’s Kitchener Post for part two of our three-part Women in Tech series. Next week:  higher education, networking and more.

• • •

By the numbers

• In 2010, the odds of a girl in Grade 1 going on to receive a Ph.D. in sciences or engineering was approximately 1 in 286. For boys it was 1 in 167.

• In an average-sized elementary school in 2010, only one child was expected to receive a Ph.D. in science or engineering, likely a boy.

(Research Council of Canada)

• 52 per cent of highly qualified science, engineering and technology women quit their jobs.

Causes for this female exodus are:

• feeling undervalued and marginalized

• hostile macho cultures

• severe isolation

• mysterious career paths

• rewarding risk taking

• family and life balance.

(Centre for Work-Life Policy June 2008)

By Andrew Coppolino

It is always a hot topic. You will find food just about everywhere: all over television, in print media, on the radio and at virtually every click on the Internet.

People love to talk about food almost as much as they love to eat it. Yet, food, over and above its tasty qualities and life-sustaining nutrition, is also an instrument, a tool.

Food, more and more, is being leveraged and co-opted. Food has become a means as well as an end. Yes, food is an event in and of itself.

We can see that at play right here in many regions of the province and in cities like Kitchener. Economic development departments in those cities are relying on a food culture and are busy boosting the presence of restaurants in their downtown cores and adding food-centric events — including hot-trend food trucks — in order to get citizens to perk up and recognize the value that a healthy food culture has to a municipality.

Restaurants themselves create spectacles around food. And both for-profit and non-profit organizations have hitched their wagons to the food-star, because food lends itself to events very well.

I’ve tried to break down a few basic ways food is used at events. Some are one-offs such as the big “Boston Bites Back” event at Fenway Park, which raised $1 million for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. Or the hugely successful Soupstock last fall, which helped thwart a vast 930-hectare quarry and subsequent raping of the countryside in Melancthon County. The event was held in Toronto but the watershed near Orangeville that participants were fighting for is an important part of our water needs here.

Food becomes the central rallying point for important non-profit initiatives that support people in need in our region.

For instance, the Food Bank of Waterloo Region, located here in Kitchener, is literally immersed in food. They run several events during the course of a year to raise funds, awareness and cans of food for families who need assistance.

This year, in addition to a golf tournament, the Food Bank added a local food component to the event that was either part of the entire day or just for those interested in the chance to celebrate and understand local food.

The Foodlink organization also has an annual Taste Local! Taste Fresh! (TLTF) food event that gets the word out about their intrinsic relationship with food. This fall’s TLTF takes place at Steckle Heritage Farm on Bleams Road in Kitchener.

But even organizations that don’t work with food in any sort of capacity have come to rely on it for getting the word out about what they do, and to raise money to continue to do it.

Another Kitchener-based outfit, the Greater Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce, holds an annual feast that draws on local cooks and produce in the region as a showcase for uniquely Ontario food.

The Kitchener Conestoga Rotary Club holds a food event during lobster season to raise money for international aid initiatives such as building schools and getting health care to poorer countries. A local student pub will sponsor a “best burger” contest to raise money for, and awareness of, Lyme disease. Events like these contribute funds and build community.

Food events have changed in just a few years from a simple carrot-and-stick tease to get folks to sign up, to becoming a component of an event that is designed to engage people and often get them thinking about their communities in more expansive ways.

These events are better publicized (thanks to social media), have more integrated partnerships and sponsorships, and generally offer better value.

It is food’s flexibility and malleability that makes it something of a chameleon that can be adapted to the present need, whether it be a bit more in the background of an event or the very thing that gets people out and working together as a community.

Regular Kitchener Post columnist Andrew Coppolino is a Kitchener-based food writer and broadcaster. Visit him at waterlooregioneats.com.

Waterloo city council was a lively place on Monday night. About 100 people packed council chambers, the vast majority of them to protest a proposal that would see the city sell a portion of the Iron Horse Trail to a developer in exchange for $83,000 and a new, reworked trail in a different location on the same block.

Despite eloquent, infomed requests from trail users and neighbourhood residents that the Mady Development Corporation come up with alternatives that would save the beloved trail, Waterloo council approved the decision in a 4-2 vote.

Many attendees at the meeting were from Kitchener, and with good reason. As a busy bike commuter route, the Iron Horse Trail is part of an active transportation network for both cities, and not simply a recreational trail.  But this decision could affect residents in Kitchener in other ways as well.

Far too frequently, and for far too long, Kitchener city staff and councillors have approved requests from developers with little or no public consultation.

Developers always want a little more — to build a little higher, to build a little closer to the road, to build a little closer to the neighbours. Though councillors sometimes make a big show of disapproval, they still agree to these variances.

Last month, Kitchener city council agreed to let the Madison Group turn their three-storey brownstone on Doon Village Road into a four-storey. Several residents came to complain about traffic and parking problems caused by the building in its current form. They also felt deceived. Several councillors chastised the developer for not requesting the fourth floor during the initial approval phase, but waiting until after it was built.

But despite the headshaking, they approved the request.

City staff and council have to work with developers in order to create infill residential projects. But they should not be handing these favours out while dismissing the possible impacts — both negative and positive — on nearby residents and others who use the space.

The Iron Horse Trail will continue to be a vital community connector, even after Mady is finished with it. But this is just the first in what will surely be many controversial skirmishes as change, not always positive, comes to neighbourhoods throughout our cities.

If a private-sector service provider charged more than double the going rate for its product over the past five years, it would lose its customers in droves and they would be up in arms at being gouged.

But if you’re a customer of Kitchener Utilities you just have to grin and bear it, since you’re hooked up to the City of Kitchener’s natural gas monopoly.

In fact, city staffers made the incredible claim that this is the way customers like it, after focus groups held in 2006 and 2012 indicated the majority of 300 customers surveyed were willing to pay higher prices for some cost certainty instead of being beholden to the whims of the market.

I wonder if those same people were interviewed again, and asked if they’d be willing to pay 125 per cent more than the average market rate, whether they’d agree to it — because that’s exactly how much more they paid last year.

Even with a modest cut to gas rates made by council at Monday night’s meeting, local natural gas customers will still pay 32 per cent more than the average rate. But those savings are quickly eaten up by delivery costs, making it a zero-sum game.

So what’s going on here? Sure, the city utility locked in its rate before the floor dropped on the natural gas market, but they should have looked for some cost relief for customers who were being hosed at the natural gas line in the meantime.

Instead, this council used those surpluses to put money into its tax stabilization fund and to help it wrangle a projected $885,000 budget deficit last year. They used it to bring down significant tax increases to much more reasonable rates in the past few budgets.

Citizens can be happy they didn’t have to directly make up for these budget shortfalls with higher taxes. But council just robbed Peter to pay Paul as they used the surpluses they collected from natural gas users to make up the difference.

While citizens didn’t have to pay directly, they more than made up for it indirectly as customers of the utility.

It’s great that Kitchener is one of the few municipalities that owns its utilities. It has been a boon for both generating revenue and funding some of the city’s more ambitious projects.

But anyone who thinks they aren’t paying for it should just look at their utility bills to figure out that most of that largesse still came out of their pockets.

City council has often used its utilities as a piggybank, putting off tough decisions while passing the buck to residents. Now you know how.

With 463 participants, the walk raised $65,000 to support research, education and services.

More than 4.6 million Canadians live with arthritis, including about 500 children in Waterloo Region.

Ten of these children were honoured at the walk with a certificate from local MPs, commending them for being walk team captains as they battle the painful and debilitating disease.

Derek Beam, 11, was also the recipient of the top individual fundraiser award for raising $7,740 and the top community team award for the Derek’s Destroyers team, which raised a total of $18,900.

Emily Lawler, 7, was the recipient of the community connector award with 84 participants on her Emily’s Explorers team.

The players collected bottles and cans one weekend last month to raise funds for their team.

Community residents donated 10,982 bottles and cans, filling an entire cube van. The haul was worth $1,250 for the team, which will help defray travel costs for tournaments.

The Kitchener Spirit U99 team has just started the 2013 season, with one tie game.

A couple of years ago, I moved daughter the elder out of dance lessons at the local community centre and enrolled her in karate.

This is nothing against the fine work dance instructors do. Daughter the elder was enjoying the dance lessons, but for her they were, at best, a distraction. I felt that a martial art like karate would teach my daughter discipline, boost her self esteem and give her a means to defend herself should (god forbid) she ever need it.

Despite this, I had some raised eyebrows. How could a girl eschew dance and take up a martial art like karate? How could she spar with boys?

Earlier this week, daughter the elder tested for and received her yellow belt. I wasn’t able to make it, as I was at a business meeting, so her mom had to take her instead. In a perverse way, I was grateful. I watched my daughter test for the red belt a year back, and it was one of the most fraught experiences I’ve yet had.

The children were lined up, told to perform karate moves, and quizzed on the art. They were only allowed three mistakes before they failed the test. The butterflies in my stomach made me almost sick, but my daughter faced up to the test with confidence and poise. She did much better than me. Of course she passed.

Heading home from her successful yellow belt exam, daughter the elder and her mother happened to stop in at a convenience store for treats. My daughter was still wearing her gi, her yellow belt tied proudly around her waist. They were served by a middle-aged woman behind the counter.

Something about the clerk’s expression (which, in ignorance, may have been akin to “why is that kid wearing pyjamas?”) must have prompted an explanation, because my wife explained that they had just been to karate and that daughter the elder had passed her exam for her new belt.

Daughter the elder then held up the end of the belt and said, “See? It’s yellow!”

And the clerk replied, “It’s very pretty.”

My wife was ticked. And I agree with her. Seriously? My daughter knows how to perform a demanding kata and can roundhouse kick you in the kidneys, and the best compliment you can come up with is “pretty”?

You think that if daughter the elder had instead been son-the-first, that the compliment would have been “pretty”?

Daughter the elder hopes to be a scientist. As in karate, this is field where some people haven’t gotten used to the idea that a woman can flourish in what has traditionally been a manly realm. I’m aware that she has some fights ahead to be taken seriously because of her gender, in spite of the gains that women fought tooth and nail for.

But I’m becoming aware that the fight to be taken seriously starts early. We’re still dealing with the belief that girls should be ballet dancers and princesses, not fighters. They should be pretty.

My daughter may be prettier than Chuck Norris, but that’s not the only thing she should be valued for. If you want society to value women who are smart and confident, we can start by changing the go-to compliments we give to our daughters.

• • •

James Bow is a writer and a father of two in Kitchener.
You can follow him online at bowjamesbow.ca or on
Twitter at @jamesbow.

“We are long-time patrons and donors of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony,” said Hartman Krug in a press release.

“We believe that the KWS is a great asset to our community and we are happy to be able to support them with this matching campaign.”

The Krugs will match, dollar for dollar, donations made before June 30, up to a total of $50,000.

“We are incredibly grateful to the Krugs for their generous and ongoing support,” said Gerard Seguin, director of development and donor relations.

Donations can be made online at kwsymphony.ca or by calling 519-745-4711, ext. 275.