This paper explores how the identities of individuals and groups are shaped by and reflected in their interaction with civic spaces through the mean of Augmented Reality (AR), comparing the Early Modern experience of the city with the contemporary one. Then and now, such interaction prompted the development of such spaces to fulfil and respond to users’ beliefs and needs. As an architect and architectural historian, I will discuss the inhabitation of civic space in Edinburgh in the Early Modern period during public events, religious processions, and civic celebrations such as triumphal entries. This paper will discuss early modern civic spaces hosting these events as ‘augmented’ ones, looking at the spontaneous and choreographed positioning of participants, and at the temporary and permanent structures which allowed them to do so by creating layers, recesses, stages, viewpoints, and frames. The interaction of human users with the politicised civic environment experientially addressed their position within the collective body–questioning, reinforcing, or readjusting it either intentionally or accidentally. I propose a comparative study of spatial engagement with specifically contemporary forms of civic realms–the virtual spaces inhabited by our virtual selves–could contribute to a discussion on our own perception of our position within society. In the Early Modern period, both urban society and the civic spaces it inhabited during these events, were strongly structured and organically layered, inclusive but also averse to personal expression, unable to allocate space(s) for personal posturing. The experience of ‘augmented’ civic space set up during ceremonies and festivals offered just such opportunities, anticipating the explorations of personal, self-directed interactions with space to be experienced initially through optical devices, Panorama entertainments, and later on, Virtual Reality (VR). My paper also questions whether these experiential devices and opportunities were empowering opportunities for the individual, or organised forms of collective escapism.

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