Princess Street Placemaking
Volunteer Initiative
Waterloo, 2021
The placemaking project at Princess Street is the outcome of the coming together of engaged creatives and change-makers in our community: the Uptown Waterloo Business Iprovement Area (BIA), City of Waterloo, Shared Places, and the volunteer team at ABA Architects. Together we transformed Princess Street into a joyful pedestrian designation: a place to connect, loosen up, and decompress.
This playful deconstruction of the lobby concept features a scattering of "tile flooring" which blend into linework and weave around meandering paths and seating arrangements. The intervention illustrates the coming together of people through movement, play, and interaction, appropriately sited within the pedestrianized portion of Princess Street.
From start to finish, the endeavor took four months of discussion and planning. This included participation in a visioning session, the design and construction of the static activations, street mural design and implementation, and obtaining proper approvals. This placemaking initiative was important in attracting more people to visit Uptown and support local businesses struggling to recover from the pandemic.
“Our gait is as personal as a fingerprint, and so are our multiple itineraries. Knowledge is grown along the myriad of paths we take”
— Tim Ingold
“Architecture is thus read as having the capacity to induce slow speeds, to inhabit silences, to trace new cultural vacancies and derelict spaces.”
— Felicity D. Scott
“Understanding cities and architecture – and communicating that understanding – involves telling real stories about real places…”
— Borden, Kerr, Pivaro, & Rendell
“Only an awareness of the influences of the existing environment can encourage the critique of the present conditions of daily life…”
— Sadie Plant
“It’s from the fragments,
the forgotten bits, that you actually read the world”
— Borden, Kerr, Pivaro, & Rendell