Kanata is two places

Say Kanata downtown and people picture office parks. Low glass buildings set back from wide roads, parking on three sides, the names of technology firms on the signs, a landscape that could be dropped into any North American suburb of any industry with almost no adjustment.

Say Kanata to somebody who lives there and they picture streets. Houses, a school, a rink, the plaza with the grocery store. The office parks are where the traffic comes from at half past four.

Both are correct and they are barely the same municipality.

My own relationship with the place has been long and undramatic. Accounting work out of Kanata from 2014, on my own account, alongside whatever else I was doing at the time, and twelve years later the company I set up is based there too. A part of Ottawa generally described in one word and obviously not one thing.

The seam

What interests me is not that a district contains both an employment cluster and a residential population. Plenty do. It is that these two run on different clocks, serve different customers, and are stitched together along a small number of arterial roads that are the only place either has to acknowledge the other.

The employment side keeps corporate time. It empties at six and on weekends and in late December. Its buying decisions are made by procurement functions, often somewhere else entirely, sometimes in another country.

The residential side keeps household time. It is busiest exactly when the other one is empty. Its buying decisions are made at a kitchen table on a Sunday.

A small business in the west end has to pick which of those it is for, and the interesting ones sit on the seam. The businesses that live off the office parks during the week and off the neighbourhoods at the weekend. The service firms whose customers are individuals who happen to draw a salary from a building four minutes away.

What I assumed about proximity and had backwards

When I was building practice work there I assumed the employment cluster was the asset. A dense concentration of well-paid people and a large number of registered businesses within a very short drive. That looks like a market.

It was not, in the direction I expected. The corporate side of that geography buys from organisations that look corporate, through processes that exist specifically to filter out people like me, and physical proximity contributes almost nothing to that filter. Being nearby is not a qualification. The building across the road might as well have been in another province.

What proximity actually produced was residential. The individuals, the small operations, the second business somebody runs alongside a salaried job. Those came from being in the same postal code in the ordinary human sense, which is to say somebody’s neighbour mentioned me.

So my map of the place was accurate and my inference from it was exactly inverted. I had correctly identified two Kanatas and then oriented myself toward the one that could not see me.

The part that stayed

I do not have a neat conclusion about the west end, and I distrust the ones I hear, which are usually a version of the technology park being the real story and the neighbourhoods being where its workers sleep. That reading is popular downtown and it is not how it looks from inside.

What I notice most is how little the two sides need each other locally. The office parks could serve their customers from anywhere. The neighbourhoods would still have a rink and a plaza. They share the roads, the name, and a school catchment, and the shared name does a lot of work in conversations that would otherwise have to be more specific.