The Tetris office: Flexwork, real estate and city planning in Silicon Valley North, Canada

Abstract

The spatial needs of knowledge workers — especially high-tech, digital workers — are of concern to digitizing companies. In order to attract and anchor talent, companies are experimenting with workplace strategies like “flexwork”, at the core of which is worker autonomy through flexible hours and workplaces. While flexwork is not new, it has been popularized by the rise of coworking, especially among the digital elites. Meanwhile, cities looking to promote economic growth are also focusing on the spatial preferences of such workers. This paper explores the motivation behind the adoption of flexwork, how this has been affecting office real estate, and how planners have reacted to these changes. Drawing from fieldwork and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with corporate consultants, real estate professionals and city planners in Canada's Silicon Valley North, I show how flexwork translates into a demand for flexible leases, which landlords seize as an opportunity to extract higher rents. This intensifies the need for flexibility, only this time for cost-saving purposes. City planners, while cognizant of this circular relationship between flexwork, flexible workplaces and rising rents, feel limited in their capacity to influence the real estate market. These insights are important considering the widespread adoption of flexwork at the onset of the Covid-19 crisis.