CAMBRIDGE — The City of Cambridge has a problem with its inventory of heritage properties.
It's a little lopsided, as hundreds of old homes and public buildings have been listed, but very few commercial/industrial properties are in the inventory.
In an effort to try and get more business building owners to list their properties the city has recruited urban planning students in Bob Sharp's class at Wilfrid Laurier University to work on the Capstone Urban Sustainability Project (CUSP).
The project is a credit course for the students, which takes a collaborative case-study approach, where teams of students work together to analyze and resolve an identified urban or local issue within Waterloo Region. The City of Cambridge and the university have worked out a memorandum of understanding where CUSP students will work on city issues over the term of a four-year agreement. This is the second year of the agreement and the CUSP students have been tasked with trying to develop new marketing materials and strategies designed to persuade the city's business community to consider listing their heritage properties.
Divided into five teams the student looked at different areas of the city. Three of the teams worked in Galt, while one each tackled Preston ad Hespeler. The teams explored each of the areas and then dug into the Cambridge City Archives and the Hespeler Heritage Centre to find out what buildings were build prior to 1950 and would qualify to be part of the heritage property inventory. They also researched the history of the old buildings that qualified looking at who had owned them, how they were used, and how they might have contributed to the development of the community.
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