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Publications
[books]
The Aerial Turn:
On the Conquest of the Air and its Impact on the City, the Territory and the Planet
Editor:
Matteo Vegetti
With contributions from the ASR team and partners:
Katrin Albrecht
Lilian Kroth
Tommaso Morawski
Lisa Parks
Caren Kaplan
With the dawn of the modern age, the conquest of the third dimension — the aerial domain — set in motion a spatial revolution that irrevocably transformed humanity’s relationship with the city, with territory, and with the planet itself. The view from above introduced an unprecedented form of spatial knowledge, one from the outset charged with profound practical implications: the command of space, largescale planning, control and surveillance, and aerial warfare. At the same time, aerial — or aero-spatial — vision gave rise to fundamental ethical and political experiences, including the emergence of an early global consciousness and the first stirrings of ecological awareness. Through a historical and philosophical lens, this book investigates the impact of the aerial revolution on both fronts, tracing the continuities and ruptures that have shaped humanity’s gradual conquest of the skies.
Table of contents:
(p. 7) Introduction. Matteo Vegetti
(13) Around the New Vision. Mark Dorrian
(27) The Influence of the Photographic Birds-Eye View on German Urbanism. Marco Rasch
(49) Aerial perspective on the large city. Subjectivities and unthought aspects of anthropization. Nathalie Roseau
(67) Discovering of the city as a whole. Representations for urban design practice at the turn of the 20th century. Katrin Albrecht
(85) Planet Earth Seen from Space: A Very Brief Visual History. Sebastian V. Grevsmühl
(99) The Last Global Spatial Revolution. The world in the age of cosmonautical enterprises. Matteo Vegetti
(113) Leaving Earth to See Earth: An Astronaut’s-Eye View of Urban Development. Jennifer Levasseur
(133) Edges of the Ice: Aerial Views and Frontier Imaginaries. Lilian Kroth and Amelia Urry
(153) The Reverse Gaze of Satellite Imaging. The reconstituted face of the Earth. Darío Negueruela del Castillo
(173) The Virtual Globe. On the Digital Earth’s Mediality. Tommaso Morawski
(189) Vertical Mediation and Geopolitics in Contemporary Yemen. Lisa Parks
(209) Out of the Blue: No-Fly Zones and Atmospheric Politics. Caren Kaplan
[italian]
Earthscapes
Le conseguenze della visione della Terra dallo spazio
Editors
Tommaso Morawski
Matteo Vegetti
Abstract
Le prime immagini della Terra vista dallo spazio ebbero un impatto rivoluzionario. Per la prima volta l’umanità vedeva il pianeta su cui vive dall’esterno: l’oceano, i continenti, i ghiacci polari, l’alone dell’atmosfera. La Terra si era ridotta a un globo terracqueo, privo di geografia politica e di storia, e sembrava un delicato gioiello abbandonato nell’immensità del vuoto assoluto. È stato proprio in quel momento che sono sorte nuove potenti visioni del mondo, con profonde implicazioni antropologiche, politiche e morali. Immagini come «Earthrise» (1968) o «The Blue Marble» (1972) – le prime fotografie del nostro pianeta scattate dallo spazio – hanno inaugurato una visione del mondo ecologica, una nuova filosofia globalista, un’inedita etica della responsabilità, rappresentando un’insostituibile fonte di legittimazione simbolica e un repertorio immaginario mai esaurito. Il libro indaga non solo il significato di tali immagini, ma gli usi che ne sono stati fatti per orientare la comprensione del mondo e ispirare modelli di comportamento. Per altro verso, le rappresentazioni della Terra dallo spazio hanno inserito il pianeta in una complessa rete elettronica di produzione, trasferimento e codifica delle immagini, che ha inaugurato la cosiddetta Information Age. Mediata dalla televisione, dai satelliti, dai sistemi di geo-localizzazione, la Terra (il suolo fenomenologico) ha cominciato così a comportarsi come un medium: mezzo di trasmissione e allo stesso tempo archivio di un insieme stratificato di messaggi visivi che ha proprio nella Terra l’origine e la destinazione. L’inserto che accompagna il volume consente al lettore di seguire con lo sguardo l’evoluzione di questa tradizione iconografica, che congiunge l’Hasselblad usata dai primi cosmonauti della Nasa agli odierni dispositivi di machine vision.
[articles]
[italian]
Un nuovo strumento per la pratica urbanistica. L’espansione coloniale negli anni Trenta attraverso la fotografia aerea
Katrin Albrecht
Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences OST
Abstract
The essay explores the multifaceted significance of aerial photography in the process of urban planning and the role it played as a new planning tool during the pioneering phase in the context of Italian colonial expansion, using the case of the infrastructural and building efforts undertaken by the Italian state in Southern Albania in the 1930s in search of oil, and reflecting them through the images published in Italian journals on urban planning projects in Ethiopia and Sabaudia.
Paper presentation at the 11th AISU International Congress held in Ferrara, September 2023, organized by the Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana AISU and University of Ferrara.
[italian]
La scoperta del paesaggio terrestre. Note sulla rivoluzione spaziale astronautica del paesaggio
Tommaso Morawski
Abstract
The most important event in cosmonautical exploration was not the reaching of distant lunar territory, but the fact that the Earth for the first time had the opportunity to see itself, to meet itself. Two photographs in particular have imposed themselves as a true visiotype of our planetary imagination, establishing the birth of a new landscape consciousness of the cosmos: Earthrise (1968) and The Blue Marble (1972). This article analyses the landscaping operation from which the new astronautical worldview originated: that “altered image of the Earth” that represents the most important and lasting legacy of the ‘astronautical spatial revolution’, the last great global spatial revolution in the air age.
Remote sensing and feminist critique: Reappropriations of sensing across distance
Lilian Kroth
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Abstract
Remote sensing technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have sparked diverse conceptual and critical responses, with feminist approaches in particular undergoing notable transformations. This article traces and contextualizes these changes, emphasizing the re-evaluation of the concept of “distance” in feminist critiques of remote sensing (RS) and GIS from the 1990s onwards. It highlights a shift from outright rejection of GIS/RS technologies as tools of masculinist, positivistic science to a redefinition of remotely sensed information and imbricated understandings of distance and proximity. The article argues that researchers view issues of masculinism from markedly different perspectives and re-evaluate the role of technology-mediated seeing and imagining, resulting in a re-evaluation of physical distance in its relationship to infrastructure, access, and care. What has transformed is what it means to be “critical” toward as well as the possibility to be “critical” with remote sensing from a feminist point of view.