Flights, Flows, Fields

The New Urban Air-Scape

When technologies like the automobile entered the fabric of cities, what began small got big quickly. Structures like parking garages, data centers, and warehouses created largely procedural territories. Could these seemingly circumstantial landscapes exhibit a greater force with the advent of drone delivery and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL)? How will evolving behaviors towards technology impact the way we process new demands on public space in the air and on the ground?

‘How might urban design, architecture, and landscape lead the coming urban “air-scape?”’

The street is a long-contested figure in urbanist discourse, largely because of its role as a civic space. Commerce, protest, and the social relationships that represent and shape our political life have historically unfolded on the street’s neutral plane. In recent years, that plane is elevating with companies like Amazon receiving air carrier certificates from the United States Federal Aviation Administration and beginning to look towards VTOL as a means of implementing drone technology even in our densest urban environments. Although safety concerns present challenges to democratizing the public airscape, new physical and administrative infrastructures are developing now.

While major corporations are testing the waters today, drone technology has already begun to find its way into the hands of aerial photography enthusiasts and AEC industry workers. The twenty-first century airscape will shape and be shaped by our existing patterns of urban development. Flights, Flows, and Fields imagines the possible roles for urban design and landscape architecture in the development of our fast-approaching airscape.