Parasituation [Edinburgh] - Waverley Gardens

Parasituation [Edinburgh] - Waverley Gardens
Dorian Wiszniewski
Kevin Adams, Neil Cunning, Chris French, Maria Mitsoula, Paul Pattinson, Leo Xian
University of Edinburgh
We propose to make bridges. We propose Morris-Bridges, Flower-Towers and more Geddes Gardens. Waverley Gardens is conceived as a bridge to the open metropolitan terrain of Edinburgh and will link, for example, Calton Hill, Arthur’s Seat, the Meadows and the full array of Geddes Gardens in the Old Town, which bring buildings and ground as coexistent healthy lungs of an interconnected Ecosophic landscape. It will be a biological and biopolitical bridge with a new canal-like pool running its length, undercutting the Royal Academy and National Gallery in parallel with the railway, bringing the galleries and all its representations of the world into the new conception of the symbiotic auto- and hetero-trophic world of the gardens. However, this bridge will also host other bridges that cross it to connect sites between the New Town and Old Town offering programmes that intercede in existing situations and those that will mark new propitious configurations of a world where people and plants accommodate each other in reciprocal processes of disappropriation, that is, in biophilic (not biomorphic) relations that open rather than foreclose themselves to the world. These are no mere fun palaces. They are fecundators of social, plant, animal, insect and bird habitat mixtures.