OTTAWA — Nokia’s plan to rebuild its laboratory and office space in Ottawa drew plaudits and pledges of money from the prime minister and the premier of Ontario, but more than half the project is about lifestyle, not technology.

“We’re hiring heavily out of university, and those kids, if they can live and get services near work, we’re going to be much more attractive than a complete drive-to location,” said Andy Thompson, a Nokia vice-president and site lead for its Ottawa operation. 

The Finland-based electronics and networking giant is spending $340 million on its new facilities and plans to hire 340 more people. The Ontario government is lending Nokia $30 million and the federal government is offering up to $40 million through the Strategic Innovation Fund.

That part of Nokia’s plan is what drew Justin Trudeau, Doug Ford and multiple cabinet ministers to a riser in the atrium of Nokia’s main building in the Kanata North business park last week, about half an hour’s drive from downtown Ottawa.

“This is a project that will build a world-class R&D hub,” Trudeau said. “It will transform the wireless technologies we rely on every day.”

But the announcement was about more than jobs and labs. If it goes as intended, the project will also transform the part of Kanata that thinks of itself as Silicon Valley North. Once Nokia’s new Canadian headquarters is built, the old one is to be demolished to make way for 11 residential towers of up to 29 floors, with street-level shops and restaurants. That part of the project takes the total estimated cost to $770 million.

A drive-to location is what Nokia has now, in a campus-style development. It was once one of the most prominent in Kanata but now blends into a sea of stubby office buildings amid parking lots, grass and wide arterial roads.

When Nokia is done, Thompson said, it wants to be at the core of a “live, work, play, innovate” community. It’s secured planning approvals from the City of Ottawa with filings that include images of coffee shops and landscaped courtyards, drawing on Toronto’s Maple Leaf Square and New York City’s High Line. These are “aspirational”—more like a mood board than ironclad promises. But the concept is very different from the classic suburban office park Nokia has now.

The company doesn’t have a development partner yet, but with the zoning in place, the broad plan is to sell its land—possibly to a residential builder and a commercial one separately, but ideally to one developer that can do both. Nokia would then lease back the space the it needs for its own use.

Nokia’s global CEO Pekka Lundmark told The Logic after the Ottawa announcement that the company has studied the expectations of the “next generation” of employees very carefully, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People will be working sometimes at home, sometimes at the office,” Lundmark said. “That puts completely new types of requirements to the office spaces. It’s going to be much more collaborative spaces rather than having traditional campus-style offices and cubicles and so on.”

Thompson emphasized that the technical upgrades are Nokia’s top priority: “For hiring the next generation of tech inventor, you need to be appealing and sexy, but most importantly, you need world-class labs. The ‘people space’ is super important. But the lab space is where you start,” he said.

Will people be in those labs and adjacent offices all the time? Probably not, Thompson said. Creativity and collaboration require workers to spend some time together, to be sure, but practically every tech job includes some solo time in front of a screen with noise-cancelling earphones on, and that work doesn’t have to be around other people.

“We’re in the middle of a story. We know what we used to have, which was very much face-to-face. We had some of the highest attendance in the company—75 per cent average, including holidays and everything. For the good or the bad, that’s changed, and the way that we work is going to change. The building is going to reflect that,” Thompson said.

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Nokia’s current buildings were constructed in phases for Terry Matthews’s Newbridge Networks in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, they were at Kanata’s north edge—on the next block up the road, cattle grazed. Now there’s a strip mall, and subdivisions, and the former gravel road is an eight-lane artery with a median that is supposed to become a busway.

The property changed hands as the company did, first to France’s Alcatel in a deal announced in 2000, then to Nokia in 2015.

“They’re all meant to be office buildings, and half of the space, roughly, is full of labs,” Thompson lamented.

That didn’t fit Nokia’s needs or its vision, and the company even considered a move to downtown Ottawa or a different suburb. Relocating ultimately made no sense, given Nokia’s deep roots in Kanata and the number of employees who already live nearby, he said, so the company went to the City of Ottawa to talk about a massive renovation on the site it already has.

Planners suggested doing away with the commercial-buildings-in-a-field design and replacing it with something more urban, Thompson said, a style he’d seen at other large tech campuses.

“You’d be, like, in the middle of Cisco and then next door there’s a bunch of five-storey condo buildings, and next to that a Starbucks, next to that a grocery store, and it’s all kind of intermixed. So they describe that to us, and we’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that makes so much sense.’”

Marianne Wilkinson was in Kanata before Nokia, or Alcatel or Newbridge—even before Kanata was Kanata. She and her family moved to what was then March Township in 1968, buying into a new planned suburb in the middle of nowhere.

When they moved in, she said, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. was the only tech employer in the area, one of the few employers of any kind.

“The business park only came about because we took a huge risk as a township in 1970,” she recalled. By then, you see, Wilkinson was the township reeve. 

A residential builder—Robert Campeau, whose international empire would later go spectacularly bankrupt—was keen to erect homes, but interest in commercial or industrial development was scant. The township council voted 3-2 to pursue the tech park, Wilkinson said, and hooked it up with water and sewer service using money that had been intended for a community arena.

“We were starting from scratch. There wasn’t anything here at all, in the beginning.”

The local government owned some of the land and was strict about the occupants on property it could control, she said. “We were trying to mold it after a little bit of a Silicon Valley thing. At the beginning, we wouldn’t even allow other businesses to go there—I remember turning a bank down.

“We said, ‘We’re going to sell this to people that are going to bring us jobs [but] you can go anywhere.’”

The “Silicon Valley thing” was campuses reminiscent of universities, iterating on the university-corporate incubator in Palo Alto, Calif., that was first called the Stanford Industrial Park. Over the years it would be home to Hewlett-Packard, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, the computer company called NeXT that Steve Jobs founded when he was on the outs at Apple, and Facebook. Really big companies would build their own campuses, like Alphabet’s Googleplex.

A problem: These campuses don’t include anywhere to live. That’s led to housing shortages, high prices and growing challenges attracting talented workers, especially early in their careers. The squeeze in Silicon Valley is acute but it’s reached Kanata, too.

“Some of the companies, from the very beginning, rented apartments to put up students or people that came for training,” Wilkinson said. “There are some people who bought houses and just have students living in them. I found that out when I was going door-knocking. At election time I’d run into a group who were there as co-op students.”

Nokia is far from alone in rethinking what it wants in a major R&D and corporate site. Silicon Valley giants are reshaping their headquarters to attract younger workers. In Vancouver, drug developer AbCellera plans to anchor a major redevelopment in an industrial area.

In Ottawa, Terry Matthews used some of his tech fortune to open a luxury hotel and golf course in 2003, shouting distance from the property that’s now Nokia’s. The Brookstreet gave visitors to Kanata a first-rate place to stay without having to drive downtown. Now the hotel, still owned by Matthews’s Wesley Clover investment vehicle, is planning an adjacent apartment tower, attached to the hotel, full of rental units of up to three bedrooms. Some will come furnished.

The target market includes young professionals, tech employees, older people downsizing their homes and corporations looking for long-term rentals for itinerant staff. “This has been a common request for many years, with very limited options for execs working and moving into the area,” Nyle Kelly, the hotel general manager and overseer of the apartment project, said in an email. 

Unlike Wesley Clover, Nokia doesn’t intend to be a landlord, Thompson said, and its plans don’t depend on any revenue from selling the land. But there will need to be some analysis of how to handle Nokia’s wish to reserve some room for further expansion later.

“I think the general approach, though, is that we’re here for 20 years-plus,” Thompson added. “We want to have an awesome office complex and lab building, and let somebody else that’s awesome at all those other things do that.”