Repositioning Drone Sensing in Landscape Urbanism and Planning

In a period of climatic breakdown, the instruments of sensing environmental change are critical. Aerial photography was the first tool in the development of modern remote sensing and various technologies have historically ‘stacked’ and ‘fused’ together to offer new possibilities in terms of coverage, definition and automation (Cureton, 2020). For Landscape Urbanism, Waldheim (1999, p.135) has asserted the indexical trace of aerial photography for the recovery of landscape as a subject and Kullman (2018 pp.906-907) has identified the unique relationship of remote sensing including drones, to the field with concurrent developments in GIS datasets and accessible satellite data which supported large scale analysis, design and planning intervention for regions. The forms of the socio-technical practice of drones through a media ecology approach have been discussed (Milligan 2019) and the mobilities of the drone and volumetric operations have been unpacked (Jensen, 2020). The current state of research raises questions around repositioning the drone to make the climate crisis more visible. This chapter discusses the requirements for this repositioning, with the author’s assertion via case studies and speculative projections, of seeing the drone as an epistemological engine, which moves through three phases. The first phase is the sensing capability of the drone ‘as matter of fact’ in terms of precision ‘reality capture’ of spaces through photogrammetric processes and other sensing payloads. The second phase is in terms of the invisible mobilities that are novel in drone deployment which we term ‘matters of concern’ (waymarked paths, flight logs, sensing instructions, tracking, navigation of regulatory geo-fences etc…) which contribute to debates of atmosphere, volumetrics and airspace. Thirdly, the post-processing of imagery through AI results in a socio-technical relationship in the interpretation of aerial time-based data or ‘drone knowledge’ for design and planning decisions made upon resulting models. This critical repositioning corrects misconceptions of the aerial drone medium as a 2D static representational tool, but as a dynamic device shaping the future sociology of the sky actively changing the terrain below.