Photo: CityAge: The Innovation City, sponsored by Communitech, has drawn a capacity crowd to the CIGI Auditorium in Waterloo.

They bike. They rent. They’re inclined to move around.

And municipal governments planning attractive urban centres would do well to satisfy Generation Y - the 17-to-35-year-old cohort that fills much of Waterloo Region’s tech community.

So says Simon O’Byrne who helped open CityAge: The Innovation City, a two-day conference that began Wednesday in Waterloo.

O’Byrne, vice-president of urban planning for Stantec Inc., said 50,000-60,000 students attend post-secondary school in Waterloo Region.

While it studies here, that future talent pool needs to be convinced to stay, O’Byrne said. Municipalities haven’t a moment to lose in creating the amenities they like.

“If it’s not compelling, they’re going to leave, and you have only a few years to capture them,” O’Byrne said.

O’Byrne called on municipal decision-makers to shake off convention, loosen planning rules and allow “messy vibrancy” to take hold. A mixture of land uses, pedestrian-friendly spaces and “surprises around the corner” make neighbourhoods attractive, he said.

“Nobody is going to move to a city because it has the best pothole-repair system in the world," O’Byrne said.

Co-founders Marc Andrew and Miro Cernetig have organized CityAge conferences across North America as the world races toward 2050, when three-quarters of the population will live in urban areas. Communitech is a key sponsor of the Waterloo event at the Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Young workers aren’t the only ones to which municipal leaders need to pay heed. O’Byrne says they should also build urban features appreciated by women, who will make up two-thirds of the white-collar workforce in the near future.

Better lighting in walkable areas, and paving that doesn’t catch the heel of a shoe, would be among those considerations.

Presentations and panel discussions through the day covered topics ranging from transportation to the massive amounts of “big data’’ people generate - usually unknowingly - by going about their ordinary business.

Among the key points:

• Steven Woods, engineering director for Google Canada, said Canadian investors need to be more generous with funding for startups. There’s no reason, he said, why the region’s tech community shouldn’t reach out to the world to raise $1 billion;

• Heather Sinclair, chief executive officer of the Creative Enterprise Initiative, said the role the arts play in creating attractive cities should no longer be mentioned as an afterthought. The arts-and-culture sector employs about 6,000 in the region; Sinclair says it should be closer to 12,000.

• Pedestrians form an indicator species, says Antonio Gomez-Palacio, a principal with the urban-design firm, DIALOG. “A place is successful if you see people milling around,’’ he said, adding that urban planning needs to shift from moving cars to moving people.

• OpenText chairman Tom Jenkins said open data - big data the public can get at - has great potential to shape the decisions cities make, but it has to be well-managed. Archiving the information, and developing the permissions and protocols enabling people to use it, is the hard part, he said.

Rich in crime statistics, traffic patterns and other good-to-know material, open data allows the public to help cities innovate, a panel noted at the end of the afternoon.

“Enabled citizens make smart citizens,” said Trish Garner, open-data manager for the City of Toronto.

The conference continues Thursday. Topics include the urban consumption of resources, changes under way in manufacturing and the partnerships that smart cities form.