KITCHENER — Hang on to your hats. Kitchener's downtown is about to undergo radical transformation, that will transform the look and feel of the region's biggest core forever.

Catalyst137 serves local makers innovating in the IoT space. It is home to everything needed to accelerate time-to-market - including a testing facility, commercialization services, and a hackable streetscape. It’s a massive 475,000 sq ft space purpose-built for makers.

Astonishing. Extraordinary. A model for the continent and the world.

LiveLocalKW was Kitchener-Waterloo’s one week challenge to eat, shop and play local and get access to great deals.

You could hear the low music before seeing anything. Humming across sidewalks, around corners and down King Street, the electronic droning sounds coming from Goudies Lane marked the start of new life for the alleyway in downtown Kitchener.

Meg Leslie, a Kitchener ceramic artist is passionate about two things: her private time to create, and sharing the arts with adults. Make it Kitchener chatted with Leslie about her background, her craft, and her theory that there’s no such thing as an uncreative person.

“Grocery stores can have windows and good music playing but still have Heinz ketchup,” says Sarah Pepper, who co-owns the newly opened J&P Grocery with her husband, John Kent.

One hundred and thirty eight per cent revenue growth seems in juxtaposition to the small, downtown business most are familiar with. But, because of Igloo, a provider of digital workplace solutions, this figure has found a home in Kitchener’s downtown core, and has nowhere to go but up, literally.

Few spaces are more ordinary or passive than an office-building hallway.  These long, narrow expanses, dotted with the occasional acrylic landscape exist solely to bring you somewhere else.  Night\Shift, Kitchener’s placehacking festival has another idea.

“We have access to incredible technology, like the smartphone recording this interview, for example,” says Brent Wettlaufer, the Underground Studio coordinator at THEMUSEUM, taking note of the phone-turned-recorder on the table. “As a user, we don’t need to know how it works, but that means we’re missing out on so much about how it’s made.”