INTERSTITIAL URBANISM: Reconvening on Princes[s] Street
“the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unre-marked onto the streets”
The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin
This project proposes that the women of Princes[s] Street past and present need a place to reconvene. Testing the New Club as a site, an arcade of passages is carved, twisting through New Town’s rigid blocks. If the rich array of past occupations and associated residents found in the private members’ clubs of Princes[s] Street were to be unfurled, using the arcade as a mechanism of housing, then what would we come across. How would women occupy this, and what re-formations of social, commercial, political and domestic spaces might play out as an interstitial urbanism?
The carving of arcades into New Town is enabled by the recent decline of Princes Street’s retail and commercial buildings. The passages weave through the blocks, folding themselves around retained existing spaces, peering into them, accessing them from a new perspective. All while making space for a new story to be told, and slowly emerge from the shadows. A vision of new inhabitation of historical space, amongst a community of female led entrepreneurs.
The carving of arcades into New Town is enabled by the recent decline of Princes Street’s retail and commercial buildings. The passages weave through the blocks, folding themselves around retained existing spaces, peering into them, accessing them from a new perspective. All while making space for a new story to be told, and slowly emerge from the shadows. A vision of new inhabitation of historical space, amongst a community of female led entrepreneurs.
