This week, after our group discussion, I began to think more carefully about how invisible boundaries in Edinburgh become normalized. This is not a sudden act of exclusion. It is a slow process. These boundaries are difficult to notice because they are repeated through everyday movement, timing, and habits of use until they begin to feel ordinary.
I started to notice this process through everyday spatial behavior. In areas such as the Royal Mile and Princes Street, where tourism pressure is especially strong, local residents often avoid the busiest times and move their daily leisure activities to less pressured parts of the city. During the festival season, some city-centre squares and routes are reorganised by performances, visitor flows, and temporary infrastructure, which further changes how local people move through and remain in these spaces. What interests me most is that, once these patterns are repeated often enough, unequal use of space can begin to look like a matter of personal choice. In that sense, invisible boundaries are not invisible because they do not exist, but because they have become part of everyday life.
This line of thought also helped me define the curatorial method of the project more clearly. In our collective discussion, I began to consider introducing a lightweight AR element into the exhibition. The main aim is to make different historical layers of the same site visible again through an AR reconstruction. At the same time, the novelty of the technology may also help attract the viewer’s attention. For example, when a viewer scans a particular street scene, they might see the present-day tourist retail frontage alongside an earlier form of local everyday use. In this way, a space that now appears stable and natural can be re-read as something produced through displacement, reorganization, and selective visibility. Used in this way, AR can help recover spatial memories that have been covered over.
At the same time, because our collective was discussing a declaration, I also began to think in advance about the kind of public effect I want this exhibition to have. A declaration should not remain at the level of a general statement of values. It should be translated into working principles for the project. First, I do not want the project to equate commercial visibility with public value. A space may have high spending power within the visitor economy, but that does not mean it is more important in public life. Discussions around the management of public space in Edinburgh already suggest that such spaces should be understood through public need and principles of use, rather than through commercial attraction alone. Second, I want viewers to recognize that unequal patterns of use based on time, season, and peak visitor flow should not be accepted as the normal condition of public space. When some groups repeatedly adapt to spatial pressure by changing their routes, avoiding busy times, or temporarily withdrawing, that inequality can easily be mistaken for a natural choice rather than a structural result. Third, I want the project to reveal how capital, management systems, and patterns of movement work together to produce spatial hierarchy, rather than simply creating an opposition between residents and visitors. I am more interested in the structural logic behind the distribution of space than in reducing a complex issue to a conflict between two groups. Only on that basis can the exhibition remain critical without reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to expose.
References
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.
Kester, Grant H. “Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art.” Variant 2, no. 9 (Winter 1999/2000).
