ABSTRACT

The Waterloo region is one of the most dynamic economic regions, relative to its size, in Canada. It is located in southern Ontario, approximately an hour west of the Toronto region and along the key transportation corridor to the United States. As the smallest region in this study, the Waterloo region contains just under half a million inhabitants. However, it is a significant economic node, with over 450 firms. The region hosts many globally active firms in core industries (automotive, advanced manufacturing, ICT, financial services, and biotech/life sciences), such as RIM, OpenText, Northern Digital, and ATS. The GDP of the region topped $21.5 billion in 2006, ranked fourth among census metropolitan areas (CMAs) in Ontario, behind the much larger communities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Hamilton on measures of GDP per capita (Statistics Canada, 2006). In addition to being industrially significant, the Waterloo region has also developed excellence in research and education. It is home to the leading University of Waterloo, as well as groundbreaking research institutes in quantum mechanics and theoretical physics. These industries and research institutes are distributed across three central municipalities – Kitchener, Waterloo, and Cambridge – which are surrounded by four townships and governed by an upper-tier regional municipality. While the region is small, relative to the other cases in this project, it is to some degree comparable to the Rhein-Neckar region in Germany. The three central cities in both cases contain comparable populations and perform similar functions in the regional economy, in terms of both their research and industrial capacities. Waterloo contains far less rural territory than Rhein-Neckar, but the urban kernels are, in many other respects, very similar.