City of Kitchener

Kitchener spent most of the twentieth century as a manufacturing city — buttons, felt, shirts, shoes, automotive parts, as Mayor Berry Vrbanovic put it on the TechWaterloo stage — and by the turn of the century was left with empty downtown factories and no room to grow in the suburbs. The city's answer was a $110-million economic development investment fund created in 2004, which put municipal money into the School of Pharmacy, a new central library, and into Communitech and Velocity, the organisations that became the region's startup infrastructure. Vrbanovic used his September 2018 talk to walk through that history and then through Digital Kitchener, the municipality's current digital strategy, framed as what a city government can actually do for a startup community. Vrbanovic has been mayor since 2014 and was a Kitchener city councillor before that.