Kanata

Kanata, Ont, unincorporated place, population 101 760 (2011c), 86 632 (2006c). Kanata was a city from 1978 to 2001 when it then was merged into the new city of OTTAWA. Urban Kanata was an award-winning "new town," begun west of the greenbelt of the nation's capital by developer William Teron in 1964. Teron's original concept was as much an attempt at social engineering as at urban development. Kanata was to consist of clusters of houses within distinctive village communities, revolving around a city centre and separated by naturally landscaped open spaces.

Business mergers favoured increased residential density, but important components of the original concept were retained after the then March Township established a planning committee with extensive powers to amend development proposals. In the original plan, 120 ha were allotted to a research and development area, and during the 1970s microchip revolution Kanata became a centre of high technology.

Former employees of Bell-Northern Research, one of the first firms to relocate, established businesses such as Mitel Corp, which began in a basement and rapidly became a multinational (seeELECTRONICS INDUSTRY). Rural Kanata contains an historic site, Horaceville - the mansion of Hamnett Pinhey (1784-1857), now a city of Ottawa museum.