Workers have yet to return to big city offices in their pre-pandemic numbers, prompting questions about how to revitalize downtown cores as nine-to-fivers spend more of their days at home and companies forge new structures around hybrid work.
Some new projects suggest there is room to build more livable communities in office-dense neighbourhoods, with a major mixed-use building in Toronto and office-to-residential conversions in Calgary set to put that idea to the test.DOWNTOWN PATTERNS, MIXED-USE BENEFITS
The completed building will feature an open-air retail and dining space, two small parks and swathes of public seating amid the residential and office tower complex – elements of a particularly desirable post-pandemic layout that the property’s owners say were a happy accident. The absence of the building’s largest office tenant could impact the restaurants and other businesses on the Well’s lower levels, though Duncan emphasized that Shopify is locked in to pay rent for the next 14 years as it searches for a subletter.
“We had the opportunity to experiment on ourselves,” he said. The office has fewer desks per person but more breakout rooms for video calls, “touchdown spaces,” desk-booking software to manage the lack of assigned seating, as well as casual “technology-free” zones for people to recharge during the workday.
The spate of vacancies was a feature of the boom-and-bust oil economy that saw office tenants move out in droves in the mid-2010s, Sheryl McMullen, Calgary’s manager of downtown strategy planning and development services, said during a Toronto panel on office conversions. COVID-19 prompted the city to take a closer look at its options.
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