Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Edinburgh Night in the Garden in relation to the city’s history of festivalized public space. In doing so, it identifies two interwoven teloi that have instituted festivals as an affective idiom used in the name of neoliberal urban growth; the festival gaze and auratic experience.

Paper long abstract:

Edinburgh exists as the pre-eminent city of ambient festival space boasting as it does a calendar of conspicuous 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 as a distinct signifier of cultural identity continues to mine the performativity of public space as evidence of a cultural and participative destination.

Over the past two decades and beyond the self-proclaimed Festival City the curation of affective urban space has been sustained by the viral discourse of Creative Cities and European Cultural Capitals. Today, in Edinburgh it seems that the lexicon of festivalized public space may be shifting its performative emphasis towards technologies of attunement that privilege both more sensory and bounded public spaces. The city's most recent addition to its calendar is Night in the Garden, a light installation that for the first time in the Edinburgh Botanic Garden's history allows visitors at night.

This paper explores the Night in the Garden's curated shadows in relation to the city's history of festivalized public space. In doing so, it identifies two interwoven teloi that have instituted festivalized public space as a recognisable affective idiom used in the name of neoliberal urban growth; the festival gaze and auratic experience.