This week’s teaching on exhibition ethics, together with James’s discussion of curatorial responsibility, helped me define the direction of my project more clearly. I have chosen Edinburgh as the site for this project, and here I understand public space as a contested field shaped by tourism, movement, accessibility, and institutional use. Edinburgh feels like an appropriate place to explore invisible boundaries because current policy debates already make these pressures visible. The City of Edinburgh Council’s visitor levy will apply to overnight stays from 24 July 2026, and the policy itself is framed around the need to keep the city attractive to visitors while also preserving it as a livable place for residents. It is precisely this tension between livability and the visitor economy that made me see the value of examining invisible boundaries in public space.
This also helped me answer a basic curatorial question: why curate this issue at all? I am not simply interested in complaining about tourism or festival culture. What I want to explore is how public space is organized, who is more able to remain within it, and whose movement is treated as legitimate. Edinburgh is not just a single example of a popular tourist city. It can also serve as a mirror, making a broader problem visible.
James’s seminar also helped me understand more clearly why this exhibition form is worth pursuing. I began to ask whether Edinburgh’s public transport network could be used to connect multiple sites, so that movement through the city itself becomes part of the exhibition. If audiences enter the project through different routes and spend varying amounts of time within it, then meaning is no longer fully controlled by a single fixed path. This idea continues my interest in non-linear viewing from the previous week, but by Week 3, it had become more directly connected to the politics of public space.
My understanding of the audience also became more specific. My core audience is local residents, not because they are somehow more “right” than others, but because they are more likely to notice long-term changes in access, crowding, and belonging. At the same time, I do not want to reduce the issue to a simple opposition between residents and tourists. Visitors are also important, because they often experience Edinburgh through highly standardised images of the city and predetermined routes, and my project may interrupt those familiar ways of seeing. Students, researchers, and disabled publics also matter to this project, because access is not only economic; it is also physical and temporal. Public space in Edinburgh is not experienced in the same way by everyone, so my audience framework needs to reflect these differences.
In terms of ethics, the key question for me is how this exhibition can avoid repeating the same exclusions that it is trying to reveal. First, I do not want to reduce the issue to a simple resident/tourist binary. Second, I do not want to turn crowding, frustration, or social difference into something to be consumed as spectacle. Third, I want to treat accessibility as a curatorial method, rather than as a technical requirement added at the end. Grant Kester’s discussion of dialogical aesthetics is especially useful here because it suggests that the real question in public-oriented cultural practice is how relationships between the work and its publics are formed.
References
City of Edinburgh Council. “About the Edinburgh Visitor Levy.” Accessed 14 April 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/business/visitor-levy-edinburgh.
City of Edinburgh Council. “The Scheme for the Edinburgh Visitor Levy.” Accessed 14 April 2026. https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/business/scheme-edinburgh-visitor-levy.
City of Edinburgh Council. City Centre Public Spaces Manifesto Update Report. 2 June 2015. https://democracy.edinburgh.gov.uk/Data/Transport%20and%20Environment%20Committee/20150602/Agenda/item_77_-_city_centre_public_spaces_manifesto_update.pdf.
