Early modern Edinburgh : identifying spatial and social relationships through the symbolic dimension of the built environment

Abstract

This thesis explores how the Scottish people of early modern Edinburgh understood the physical construction of this walled city, and will focus on how Edinburgh’s inhabitants saw, knew, and understood specific places. It will look at the symbolic dimension of the built environment and how it directly affected the development of individual and group identity, and their power, spatial, and social relationships. Edinburgh was more than just a backdrop for historical events. It helped to define social and spatial relations, and the inhabitants’ sense of public and private. The subjectivity of these places affected how different people used them and interacted with others in them. Places should not be seen as an absolute. Their cultural and spatial relationships depended on how people used them, saw them, understood them; and that understanding was created by a person’s age, gender, and status in the culture.