ABSTRACT
This chapter features a project that focuses on a much more immediate, instinctive experience of place, and in doing so, it further engages with ideas of the more-than-representational and embodied, affective encounters. Our interaction with the materiality of the city enables an intimate connection with 'distant presences, events, people and things'. However, this 'attunement' is also triggered by our embodied, affective encounters and the resulting empathetic response that might be described as a 'peculiar, inarticulable feeling of pathos'. Cities such as Edinburgh are continually emergent patchwork constructions that evidence multiple temporalities. Much of Edinburgh's Old Town retains elements of its seventeenth century construction. Cities inevitably carry with them, and continue to produce, material traces that evoke past histories and spectral presences. This type of haunting foregrounds absences that are produced between materiality and immateriality, and absence and presence, and this relational phenomenon is brought to life via our experiences within place.
