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Aerial Spatial Revolution
[Status: Ongoing
Airborne technologies have become powerful devices for the control, governance and manipulation of space. In warfare, the destructive capabilities of aviation have evolved enormously, not least through the use of drones and satellite vision. In civilian life, satellites scan terrestrial space, extract data and transform it into information that reshapes spatial orientation (think Google Maps), they influence planning (as in the case of GIS), enter things (drones, cars, etc.) and endow them with the ability to ‘see’, and provide a scopic regime that enables the governance of space on previously unthinkable scales.
In the new ‘spatial assemblages’ (Sassen 2006), human and non-human actors merge their respective intelligences, generating environments and atmospheres engineered by the network, but apparently as transparent as the aerial element whose heirs they are. As has been rightly noted, we are increasingly ‘airborne’ (Adey 2014). However, the spatial revolution inaugurated by aeronautics at the beginning of the 20th century has not yet been studied as a whole and in all of its implications, especially in reference to urbanism and architecture. As Mark Dorrian states, a ‘cultural history of the aerial view that is adequate to the complexities of the topic has yet to be written’ (Dorrian 2007: 1).
Our aim is thus to provide the first coherent, transdisciplinary study on the history and impact of the aerial third dimension, focusing on its material and imaginary effects on city, architecture and territory from the beginning of the 20th century to present day.
The guiding research questions are therefore:
- How did aerial technologies and aerial vision reform urban design and architecture throughout the modern age?
- What types of spatial imagery have accompanied the historical development of aeronautics up to the present time?
- Through which cognitive transformations and media-technical change is it possible to trace the genesis and development of the relationship between air and land?
- To what extent do many of modernity’s artefacts turn out to be ‘aerofacts’?
Thanks to the broad time frame, the research will be able to ‘map’ the discursive trajectories, visual paradigms and perceptual thresholds that have contributed to shaping the way we practise (often with partial awareness) the contemporary urban environment, contributing to the development of a critical, historically-informed understanding of the profound transformations taking place in our society. Critics have often argued that tackling such an exhaustive topic would require research that is ‘deliberately critical, highly international and unusually interdisciplinary, in addition to being as visual as it can be’ (Graham 2016: 14).
This research project aims to fulfil these requirements by crossing different perspectives and competences - urbanism and architecture, aesthetics, visual media theory, and political philosophy -, combining a hermeneutical, epistemological and historical approach, which includes the study of archival material and visual and written source documents of various media. Its innovative potential lies in the complementary confluence of different methodological and analytical approaches enabled by transdisciplinary collaboration.
Set up as a three-year project, the research will be developed along three thematic axes:
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Aerovision (coord. by Prof. Emmanuel Alloa);
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Aeroplanning (coord. by Prof. Katrin Albrecht);
- Aeropolitics (coord. by Prof. Matteo Vegetti).
Each axis will be linked to and dependent upon the others in terms of structure and content, and at the same time carry a specific disciplinary competence. The proposed project will close a major research gap, assessing the extent to which the Aerial Spatial Revolution has promoted, and is still promoting, novel ways of understanding, perceiving, designing and practising the city, architecture and territory.