Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Aerial photographs of the United Kingdom taken during the drought of 2018 revealed crop marks tracing past settlement patterns. These indexical marks brought to light long-buried sites of human occupation that had restructured terra firma in the British Isles. The physical and conceptual practice of archaeology is easily recognized in such acts of uncovering historical urban structure as cultural artefact. This paper extrapolates on the practice of archaeology as an act of uncovering and retrieving artefacts, but inverts our gaze toward the air. Exterior space becomes airspace when described in legal terms. The British common law’s historic position on airspace assumed that property owners held exclusive rights to the space above their land. This is expressed in the Latin maxim cujus est solum ejus est usque ad caelum et ad infernos, indicating that ‘one who owns the land, owns what is below and above to an indefinite extent.’ Yet with the normalization of aviation over the past century, past assumptions were quickly re-configured to account for increased human use and occupation of this territory. A normalization of unmanned aerial vehicles will soon require further reimagining of our relationship to the airspace. While no city has yet experienced a wide-spread integration of unmanned aerial vehicles, pilot projects already exist for every populated continent. This paper investigates the traces from this restructuring of airspace and reflects on their implications for design disciplines in transition.