Exposing the Repetitive History of a University Town's Student Housing Problems
Photographs and Articles on Student Accomodations in Waterloo, Ontario
About the universities...
The University of Waterloo was founded in 1957, Wilfred Laurier University in 1960, and Conestoga College in 1967. U Waterloo was established to train engineers to fill the growing positions after the war and was the first Canadian school to offer co-op. Wilfred Laurier University, which until 1973 was known as the Waterloo Lutheran University, started out as a Lutheran seminary in the early '90s before becoming a college and eventually it's own university. Conestoga College, formerly known as Conestoga College of Applied Arts and Technology, is a public college offering various diplomas, certificates and a few degrees as well.
With these three institutions being located so close together, students who move to Waterloo with the purpose of attending any one of these schools all end up living in the same area.
This website, through archives and new images, will focus on how the incessant demand for more housing has caused the neighbourhood between these three schools to be in a constant state of transformation, decay, and regrowth spanning decades. Some areas in the student neighbourhood have remained the same over the many years, others changing from one low to another. The archival texts will present the various problems associated with this that all come from the tension between trying to establish a permanent culture within a town while simultaneously profiting off the needs associated with a consistently changing population. It will also show how these problems have also been ongoing, repeated, but never truly solved. My recent images, blending with those found images and texts, will cement the notion that this is not a story of just the past.
A secondary section of the project shows all the images of the town today, presenting homes in all the different stages.
This project hopes to answer: how does a transient student population affect the permanent physicality of the town? This project also explores how profit and industry affect history, and how modernization overtakes traditional charm and values.