Urban Life and Design in the Drone Age

Description

From infrastructure inspection and commercial delivery to emergency services, drones increasingly feature in UK skies. Drones are celebrated as enabling diverse urban applications and are popularly associated with economic, social, and sustainability benefits. Yet, while a 2022 UK Government ambition statement outlines aims for commercial drones to be ‘commonplace by 2030’, and European counterparts continue to pursue the implementation of Urban Air Mobility more widely (e.g., EASA’s Roadmap to Urban Air Mobility), it remains that urban air mobility technologies including drones variously impact urban populations and built environments. Data-capturing drones prompt concerns around privacy, visual and noise pollution. Further, the drone’s reliance on digital and physical infrastructures, from air traffic management to routing, landing pads and logistics spaces, raises timely and critical questions about the volumetric design and planning of the built environment. This is at once evident and grounded through the case of ‘Project Skyway’, the world’s longest proposed and presently under-development drone-highway connecting 165-miles of airspace above six UK towns and cities. Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork with industry and local authority participants, this presentation seeks to bring into dialogue urban and political geographies with design scholarship, pursuing an interdisciplinary reading of Project Skyway in order to critically interrogate urban life and design in the drone age. In so doing, it is interested in at once contributing to an interdisciplinary research agenda and vocabulary attentive to critical questions around the (lived implications of) urban design in the drone age, and to offering methodological reflections around grappling with advanced air mobility technologies as they are at once imagined, (co-)constituted and variously touch down.

Period	28/08/2024
Event title	Royal Geographical Society: The 'Disrupting the transport geographies of the UK? A research agenda for Advanced Air Mobility Technologies'
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International