CIVICSCOPE uses photographic, digital and archival resources to witness the city, its architectures and its voices evolve through time and space. It combines planning documents, maps and community archive with original photographic and photorealistic mapping in a multi-perspectival panoramic exhibition of the Granton Waterfront Redevelopment Area in North Edinburgh. Structured as a bi-directional leporello, Civicscope unfolds horizontally and vertically, in a tour of archival, virtual, idealised and community views of the area. The result is a kind of survey that references the precepts of the two best known Edinburgh town planners, Patrick Abercrombie and Patrick Geddes and recognises the challenges and contradictions of modern planning and consultation methods.
Civicscope is a visual artefact. It is presented deliberately in an aesthetic informed by the materials and architectural premises of new brutalism that guided so much of post-war development in the north Edinburgh areas of Granton, Muirhouse and Pilton. Twentieth century archive unfolds in parallel with idealised visions of the future rendered in their own 21st century urban planning aesthetic. Underneath these two visions of old and new, the archival and the ideal, are the theories, the policies and the plans that make up the infrastructures of consultation and design. Google Earth imagery captures the proximity of the virtual in everyday life – an architectural photographic odyssey through the datasets and data flows of the Google machine – that is sometimes, certainly in pandemic times, as close as we can get to the ground. At the bottom of all of this is the people, the community, the artists and the activists who live on that ground.
Civicscope was created by Simon Phipps and Darren Umney in collaboration with EFI and JCE
