The construction of an aerial gaze has a long history, well before the beginnings of aviation, well before the invention of balloons, when from the top of medieval belvederes one could discover the panorama of the city and its surroundings. However, the context of the evolution of the greater city with its ever-fading limits gradually gave meaning to the aerial apprehension of space, that of a stable, free and autonomous movement in the third dimension, equipped with visual prostheses (photography, cinema), which allowed to grasp a reality that constantly escapes human perception. The quest for figurability of the large city crossed a bundle of inventions and appropriations, opportunities and contexts, allowing the development of an aerial thought of the space whose interferences did not cease to work the architecture and the urbanism. Representations, projections, realizations: this paper will question the functions of this imaginary that has influenced urban futures, pointing out its subjectivities and its unthinking, while cities and territories are confronted with the critical stakes of the anthropocene: ecology, globalization, digitalization.

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