Repositioning Drone Sensing in Landscape Urbanism & Planning

In a period of climatic breakdown, the instruments for 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 au-tomation (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 relation-ship of remote sensing, including drones, to the field with concurrent develop-ments 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 dis-cussed (Milligan, 2019), and the mobilities of the drone and volumetric operations have been unpacked (Jensen, 2020). Finally, the current state of research raises questions about repositioning drones to make the climate crisis more visible. This chapter discusses the requirements for this repositioning, with the author's asser-tion via case studies and speculative projections of seeing the drone as an episte-mological engine, which moves through three phases. The first phase is the sensing capability of the drone, 'as a matter of fact' in terms of precision' reality capture' of spaces through photogrammetric processes and other sensing payloads. The second phase concerns invisible mobilities novel in drone deployment, which we term 'matters of concern' (waymarked paths, flight logs, sensing instructions, tracking, and navigation of regulatory geo-fences, which contribute to debates of atmosphere, volumetrics and airspace. Thirdly, the post-processing of imagery through AI results in a socio-technical relationship in interpreting aerial time-based data or 'drone knowledge' for design and planning decisions made upon resulting models. The three phases and critical repositioning correct 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.