Edinburgh Napier University

  Edinburgh boasts an identity reliant upon the curation of ambient festival space and cosmopolitan public life that announces the arrival of a self-consciously international urban mood. The city’s longstanding ‘reflexive accumulation’ (Lash and Urry 1995) of ambient environments and public arts continues to mine the performativity of public space as evidence of a cultural and participative destination. Over the past two decades the self-proclaimed Festival City’s curation of affective urban space has been sustained by the viral discourse of Creative Cities and European Cultural Capitals. Today, in Edinburgh and beyond it seems that the lexicon of festivalized public space may be shifting towards the planning of rarefied sensory encounters thereby extending the embodiment imagined in The Sensory Landscape of Cities (Landry 2012). The city’s most recent addition to its calendar is Botanic Lights, which is a light installation that runs for two weeks in October and provides an exclusive experience of Edinburgh Botanic Gardens by night. The event transforms the living landscape into a series of art encounters thereby summoning an experience of the garden’s material environments that extends their intelligibility and asks not what it is, but how it makes us feel. This paper explores Edinburgh’s Botanic Lights in relation to Nieland’s (2008) reading of publicness which foregrounds experiential and affective registers that produce new proximities and structures of urban feeling. Claims to the event’s place-making, and community engagement are critically addressed in relation to the imagined potential of somatic publics.