Dronesphere: Competing Imaginaries by srabyniuk

DRONESPHEREIMAGINARIES

10 pamphlets on aerial architecture Simon Rabyniuk

Simon Rabyniuk M.Arch Thesis Research 2018-19 Daniels Faculty of Architecture University of Toronto s.rabyniuk@mail.utoronto.ca

112TH CONGRESS " 2d Session

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REPORT 112–381

FAA MODERNIZATION AND REFORM ACT OF 2012

something about test bed urbanism... CONFERENCE REPORT TO ACCOMPANY

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Competing Aerial Imaginaries

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The “FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012” compelled the Federal Aviation Administration to create a ‘road map’ for the integration of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) into the United State’s national airspace.

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Unamanned Aerial System Regulation

With Title IIIB, Sec. 332, of the FAA Modernization and Reform act of 2012, the United States Congress compelled the Federal Aviation Administration to pursue the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.

Taxation Lobbying

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CONTRACTS Competing Aerial Imaginaries

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Regulations governing the use of UAV technologies in the doestic sphere are being written by public safety and transport regulators with input from industry stakeholders. For this reason safety and logistics are the two primary areas of consideration. A fuller conversation is required addressing other criteria such as privay through a civili liberties lens, amongst others areas.

Competing Aerial Imaginaries

Left | 2016 drone delivery trial of pizza orchestrated by Reno Nevada based company Flyrty in partnership with international chain of convenience store 7-11. Right | 2018 Drone delivery trial of difibulators by Flyrty with a public-private partnership hosted by the City of Reno.

Competing Aerial Imaginaries

IPP Awardees 1. University of Alaska Fairbanks 2. The City of Reno 3. City of San Diego 2. 4. North Dakota Department of Transportation 5. Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma 6. Kansas Department of Transportation 3. 7. Memphis-Shelby County Airport Authority 8. Lee County Mosquito Control District 9. Innovation and Entrepreneurship Investment Authority, Herndon, VA 10. North Carolina Department of Transportation

Washoe County City of Reno City of Sparks

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Reno Police Dept Sparks Police Dept. Reno Fire Dept Sparks Fire Dept. Carson Fire Dept. Tuckee Meadows Community College

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Reno-Sparks Indian Colony

Northern Nevada Medical Centre

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ROBOTICS Iris Automation

COMPETING AERIAL IMAGINARIES Introduction Dronesphere describes the space of action of aerial robotics. Powered flight, with a history of more than one-hundred and fifteen-years, has transformed humans’ relationship to territory and time. Concorde, a supersonic jet capable of transatlantic flight in under three hours, is but one civilian example of this. Created in 1969, the same year as the first public Concorde flight, Kohei Sugiura’s graphic visualizations of timedistance maps registers the experiential deformation of physical geographies from transportation infrastructure. Present-day negotiations, focusing on the integration of drones into urban airspace are poised to expand the protocols and infrastructure which organize powered flight. These negotiations are currently on going and are developing through a method of district scale prototyping which Orit Halpern et al., describe as “test bed urbanism.”[1] This paper focuses on describing the complex publicprivate partnerships engaged in the integration of civilian drones within the United States. It does so by analyzing two multi-city pilot projects, the Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Traffic Management Pilot Project (UPP) and the UAS Integration Pilot Project (IPP). It argues that individual members of these 1

Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, “Test Bed Urbanism,” Public Culture (2013) 25 (270): 290.

partnerships have distinct ideas and practices and that these constitute competing aerial imaginaries. This is significant to address within architectural discourse as each of these imaginaries produces different spatial schemes that territorialize the city in distinct ways. The genealogy of drones traces back to World War 1. War-time industrial production of airplanes established the conditions that allowed for flight to emerge as a civilian industry during the 1920s. Aviation’s commercial expansion spurred both new infrastructure and then new protocols for the management of powered flight.[2] Pre-World War 1 civilian flight was served by airstrips in agricultural land; however, expanding commercial flight required a more formal logistical apparatus for coordinating the movement of people and things. The airport emerged to serve this role. It is a unique typology of building for how it is both infrastructure and architecture.[3] Concomitant with the expansion of commercial flight was both congestion and mid-air collisions – with many of these accidents occurring near airports. As such, the space of the sky was transformed through legislative acts, from an undifferentiated openness, into airspace. Airspace, in defining and encoding volumes of air, makes the space of powered flight visible. It 2 3

Paul E Illman, “Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge,” (Oklahoma City: United States Department of Transportation, 2016): 4. Sonja Düppleman, “Flights of imagination: aviation, landscape, design”, (Charlottesville ; London: University of Virginia Press, 2014): 31.

“wires the difference” between inside and outside creating protocols that determine the conditions for passage and operation. In organizing the sky, airspace deconflicts civilian flight. Its protocols determine where and when pilots can enter, pass through or exit an area as well as governs their communication. These traits are similar to what Bernard Siegert describes as cultural techniques, which “operationalize distinctions in the real.”[4] Airspace has a geometric form, often appearing as stacked concentric volumes centered on airports, military sites, and significant events or emergencies.[5] The last two type of sites reflect the nature of airspace as a time-based system that changes in reaction to events. The United States employs seven classes of airspace with only lowaltitude airspace being classified as uncontrolled. Derek Gregory, in “Drone Geographies,” notes that “[we] all live under the shadow of the drone, although most of us are lucky enough not to live under its direct fire.”[6] In describing the planetary 4 5

Reinhold Martin, “The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolotics and the City,” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016): 143. Pilots use Visual Flight Rules Charts (VFR Charts) to plan flight routes below 18,000’. Known as “sectional maps” these maps reveal both the plametric and sectional details about the territorial boundaries of flight. Static versions of these maps document stable classifications of airspace; however, websites such as https://skyvector.com/ include event-based updates such as airspace closures related to planned or unexpected events. Derek Gregory, “Drone Geographies,” Radical Philosophy

reach of the “shadow of the drone,” Gregory registers the expansive presence of aerial robotics already within present-day life. While his writing focuses on military geographies, cities’ low-altitude airspace are the next frontier for this “telecheric” technology.[7] Nation States are legislating aviation departments to research and develop new regulations for the integration of “unmanned aerial systems” (UAS) into national airspace. This integration emphasizes civilian uses of drones. While within the twentieth-century, new infrastructures and protocols for powered flight emerged at a national scale, a form of “test-bed” urbanism, employed as a strategy of smart city projects, is being used to prototype the integration of drones into cities. Complex Partnerships A commonality between projects prototyping emerging technologies at the scale of city districts is an underlying complex set of agreements between

(2014) 1 (183): 8. Last accessed on 2018-06-11, <https://www. radicalphilosophy.com/article/drone-geographies> Gregoire Chamayou, “Theory of the Drone,” Translated by Janet Lloyd (New York: The New Press, 2015): 21-23. Chamayou recounts J.W. Clark’s 1964 formulation of the “telecheric machine.” He notes how Clarck’s “technology of manipulation at a distance” creates distinct mental models for organizing space. In Clark’s instance, the division reorganizes space into hostile and safe territory. The remotely controlled robot allowed a human to intervene in a “unsafe” territory while remaining at a distance. It still remains to be seen if this is model of organizing space will remain intact through the integration of civilian drones.

public institutions and private enterprise. The work of different institutional actors, including regulatory agencies, startups, multinationals, universities, think tanks and lawyers are presently testing competing aerial imaginaries. More broadly theorized as “social imaginaries” by the philosopher Charles Taylor, the aerial imaginary exists in the realm of social practice and is reflected by shared ideas about how institutions work. First applied to the study of competing modernisms, Taylor’s social imaginaries are not just ideas but have material expressions found in artifacts that reflect cultural and aesthetic practices. [8] Reinhold Martin generalizes the term, describing it as “all of those everyday ways in which a society imagines itself as a society,” further noting how social practices – comprised of infrastructures, artifacts, and mental constructs – are ways of seeing and ways of knowing that emerge as forms of co-produced knowledge.[9] In this sense, aerial imaginaries are comprised of the social practices of flight including its institutions, infrastructures and protocols. Throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, this has included industry bodies, air traffic control, airports, and airspace, among others things which produce the current form of powered flight. Martin Heidegger, in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” argues that a bridge makes the two banks 8 9

Charles Taylor, “Modern Social Imaginaries,” (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2004): 2. Martin, “The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolotics and the City,” 46.

of a stream appear through the act of crossing it. Constructing the bridge makes the stream appear as such, and in doing so produces a “locale,” which in turn produces space.[10] Reinhold Martin further qualifies this by describing the act of appearance, performed by the stream, as occurring phenomenologically. This suggests that the application of technology changes human perception of space. As such, the concept of the aerial imaginary proceeds from air gaining a new visibility from the act of a drone bridging two points. Once visible, air becomes the subject for projective visions articulating different ideas for the locale’s use and inhabitation. This is to say that social imaginaries, including the aerial imaginary, neither begin as projective ideas nor as material practices but emerge concurrently. This also suggests that how the drone bridges two points produces different locales. Here it is important to note that the drone itself is not a singular object, but is morphologically diverse, with these differences producing a range of distinct capacities. A simple material example is the difference between fixed wing and rotorcopter drones, with the former having an advantage in the areas of endurance and distance, while the latter benefits from vertical takeoff and landing and finer maneuverability. Infrastructure has traditionally fallen outside of the interests of architectural historians. In this instance, there 10

Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in: Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993): 354– 355.

is a gap in theory and criticism addressing designers’ relationship to powered flight. Recently, Susanna Salata addresses this question in relationship to three modernist airports which she argues for interpreting as architecture, rather than just infrastructure. [11] Concurrently Sonja Düppleman, in “Flights of Imagination,” constructs a more comprehensive view of the intersection between landscape, architecture and flight. Düppleman’s wider framing of the topic includes constructing the cultural milieu for early twentieth-century speculative airports located in the core of cities. Andre Lucant’s, Aéroparis, decks over Île de Cygnes in Paris’ Seine River. While, Robert Keally took the roof of Pennsylvania Station in New York as optimal site for an aerodrome. Düppleman notes how both of these projects proceed from the idea that the “currency” of flight was time and that therefore colocating airports in multi-modal hubs was perceived to provide the greatest utility.[12] Lucant and Keally’s airports offer collective urban scale visions for flight; however, aerial urbanism has also been used to mobilize arguments for the decentralization of cities. Frank Lloyd Wright, dating back to the 1930s, argued that the inter-war city was “obsolete.” He notes in “Disappearing City,” that advances in communication and transportation 11 12

S. Santala. “Laboratory for a New Architecture: The Airport Terminal, Eero Saarinen and the Historiography of Modern Architecture” (Ph.D.diss, University of Helsinki 2015). Düppleman, “Flights of imagination: aviation, landscape, design,” 24– 25.

technology could free the urban dweller from the congestion and rent-based indenture.13 “Broadacre City” (c. 1930s) and “Living City” (c. 1950s), are two projects which clarify his intentions for decenteralization. In them, Wright employed “helicopter taxis” which, performing in conjunction with radio towers, Wright-designed cars, and commuter barges, proposed a sprawling urban fabric intended to both incite more autonomous forms of life, and a more vital democracy.[14] However, Ralph Rapson’s “Case Study House #4” celebrates the possibility of powered flight while embracing the reified lifestyle of the suburban commuter. (figure 7) Like other Case Study Houses, Rapson presented a scheme for a single family home; however, he included one significant adjustment – a helicopter landing pad. This addition proposes a different vision for the 1940s commuter. While taking to the sky might have avoided the constraining vectors of a congested highway system, it doesn’t seem all together clear whether Rapson recognized that the space of the sky already had its own set of paths and protocols for movement. [15] Given Rapson’s early formulation of a privatized urban air mobility, one might ask whether low-altitude airspace would fair any better than the highway system if 13 14 15

Ibid., 25. The term “Air Urbanism,” first used by Domenico Andriello in 1947, signals the influence of powered flight on human settlements. Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Disappearing City,” (New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1932): 15, 27,. Düppleman, “Flights of imagination: aviation, landscape, design,” 26.

commuters took to the sky en masse. Test Beds Complex public and private partnerships are prototyping the integration of drones into domestic airspace. This set of diverse projects can be grouped together under the term urban air mobility. No city has yet confronted a large scale domestic integration of civilian drones. Dating back to 2013, through the creation of regulatory zones of exception, specific districts serve as sites of experimentation. Regulators, airports, university researchers and enterprise are collaboratively investigating questions about air traffic management, mixing drones and piloted air traffic, flight over crowds, flight near buildings and over streets, navigational challenges within the urban canyon, as well as automation, swarm behaviour, and human-drone interactions. Again, Halpern et al., label small-scale prototyping of emerging technologies into cites as “test bed urbanism.” The term “test bed” is adapted from engineering and reflects the practice of conducting small scale experiments with the intention of scaling viable findings for use within larger systems.16 Further to this, she attributes it as a unique method found in the development of smart cities, and that it is a different approach than found in past Utopian projects. The effect of test bed urbanism is the administrative “redistricting of bodies and information” conducted through complex 16

Halpern et al., “Test Bed Urbanism,” 290.

partnerships between public institutions and private enterprise.17 Antione Picone, also addressing pilot projects for emerging technologies, connects smart city initiatives to cybernetics discourse from the 1950s to 1960s.[18] Ross Ashby, in his “Introduction to Cybernetics” in 1957, defines cybernetics as “the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine.” In a cybernetic sense, test-bed urbanism’s “redistricting of bodies” equally attends to controlling the behaviour of humans as it does to drones.[19] In 2012, through the Federal Aviation and Reform Act, Congress tasked the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) with developing regulations for the operation of commercial drones within the United States. In 2013, the FAA announced the participation of seven publicprivate partnerships in the Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management Pilot Project (UPP). Sited across the continental United States and Alaska, UPP participants adapt existing airspace management concepts for the integration of drones into both rural and urban lowaltitude airspace.[20] One site of note is Reno-Stead Airport, which has provided the site for three of four of drone traffic management “technology capability 17 18 19 20

Ibid., 275. Antoine Picon, “A New Urban Ideal,” in Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (Chichester; West Sussex: Wiley, 2015): 16. Ross Ashby, “Introduction to Cybernetics,” (London: Chapman & Hall, 1957), 1. Mike Scott (Airport Manager at Reno-Stead Airport) in discussion with the author, June and August 2018.

level” (TCL) tests, designed and commissioned by NASA. UPP key deliverables include a “UAS air traffic management architecture,” which includes a flight information management system (FIMS). These are technical systems, intended to govern spatial relations, that manage both emergent behaviour and emergencies.[21] In advance of NASA’s 2019 report to the FAA, which will outline findings from the UPP tests, the FAA has initiated another set of tests known as the Integration Pilot Project (IPP). Launched May 2018, it is a set of ten partnerships, with various public entities in the lead role. IPP participants do not necessarily match the UPP participants; however, the City of Reno is participating in both. Reno’s IPP team includes: Flirtey, Reno Police Department and Reno Fire Department, Washoe County, City of Sparks and Sparks Fire Department, FedEx, Regional Emergency Medical Services Authority (REMSA), Alpine Insurance, Northern Nevada Medical Center, The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, Truckee Meadows Community College, Carson Fire Department, Iris Automation, AirMap, T-Mobile and The American Red Cross.[22] 21

Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique,” Greyroom (2017) 68: 122– 123. Halpern et al., argue that smart cities are seen to enable “resilience,” and that this conception collapses the categories of emergence and emergency into situational management. This is indicative of NASA’s current attitude towards traffic management for urban air mobility. On September 12, 2018, five months after the launch of

ddressing the context of the United States, Adrienne Lindgren, formerly of the LA Mayor’s office, describes the complexity of these multi-party agreements as P4s as opposed to P3s which characterizes them as public-private partnerships including representatives from multiple levels of government.[23] While the role of different partners in the IPP is not always clear, it does seem that different members have their own goals and desired outcomes. Additionally, given the diversity of membership in these partnerships, questions of jurisdiction and hierarchy are not necessarily easily answered.[24] What is at stake within these experiments are the protocols and infrastructures which will territorialize urban airspace, producing urban air mobility, in whatever form it may take, as a new “second nature.”[25]

24 25

the the IPP, The City of Reno announced it had completed its first test flight within the IPP. After The City of Reno, the technology startup Flirty is the next most visible partner. While their current interest is the delivery of emergency medical devices, dating back to 2016, Flirty partnered with the convenience store chain 7-11 to complete a trial for the drone delivery of pizza. Adrienne Lindgren, “Smart City Policy Makers,” (panel, Uber Elevate Summit, Los Angeles, CA May 8th - 9th, 2018). Accessed on 2018-08-01, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1Pnafi5nMYs. Adrienne Lingrend (former Manager Economic Policy & UAS Integration, LA Mayor’s Office) in discussion with the author, August 2018. William Cronon, in “Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West” (1992) uses the terms “first nature” and “second nature” to contrast a physical environment free of human

Reno’s application for the IPP (the most distilled of the ten successful applicants) “focuses on the timesensitive delivery of life-saving medical equipment, such as medical defibrillators in emergency situations in both urban and rural environments.”[26] Other applicants are prototyping the urban use of drones in the following areas: food and package delivery, international commerce, autonomous flight, surveillance, agriculture, emergency response and public safety, airport and infrastructure inspection, pest control and drone detection. Through these processes, they will develop practices for addressing flight beyond the visual line of sight of pilots, drone operation over crowds of people, night time flight, drone “detect and avoid,” drone identification and tracking, mapping tools and procedures for integrating flight with piloted vehicles. Given this varied list of activities, the drone appears as a general purpose system for the mediation of physical distances. It seems as if the more important questions that the UPP and IPP are investigating focus on how to integrate drones into the United State’s national airspace, as opposed to what to use them for. These

intervention with that of one that has been remade through the application of technology. Specific in Cronon’s use is how people, immersed in “second nature,” accept it as if it were a natural state. Federal Aviation Administration, “Integration Pilot Program Awardees,” accessed on 2018-06-01, https://www. faa.gov/uas/programs_partnerships/uas_integration_pilot_ program/awardees/.

pilot projects are developing a set of competing ideas and practices about where drones can move, when they can move, how they communicate, as well as their relationship to other drones, piloted vehicles, crowds, streets and buildings. For this reason it is important to consider the interests of different stakeholders involved as they will materially effect the use of future city skies. Halpren et. al., reflecting on Song Do, her original smart city case study of “test bed urbanism,” notes how the private members within Song Do’s public-private partnership used district-scale prototyping as a means to create new markets for their own products. In the context of the IPP, its interesting to note that Flirty’s first drone delivery pilot, which engaged 7-11 as a partner, involved delivering pizza. In this light, their current interest in emergency response seems disingenuous. Vigilant but not skeptical, Adrienne Lingrend, notes how the vanguard of urban air mobility are doing a poor job articulating the public benefit from it. One issue at stake within technology-oriented public-private partnerships is clear accountability that decisions reflect public good, rather than private interest. While the FAA still holds the reputation of being a strong “gate keeper” of public interest for civilian aviation; they have also claimed jurisdiction for urban air mobility as a federal-level issue. In doing so States and Municipalities who have proactively regulated urban air mobility are now having those regulations challenged and overturned. The FAA’s jurisdictional claim is producing a smooth regulatory field favourable to drone operators working across

multiple state-lines; but this also is removing the possibility for local debate. Just as current forms of controlled airspace have specific geometric forms, so to do each of these competing aerial imaginaries. This invites seeing the city sky as having a set of possible figures, defined through establishing low-altitude airspace as a form of controlled airspace. This is important to understand as these forms emerge as a part of neocybernetic smart city projects which seek to manage behaviour in both animals and machines. While it is not clear what form urban air mobility may take in the Unite States, given that the integration of drones into national airspace is an act of congress, what is certain is that it will happen. As this subj`ect is emerging, further attention could be given to speculating on the protocols and infrastructures of these competing aerial imaginaries. This could begin by describing a set of organizational types for integration schemes.

Competing Aerial Imaginaries

Works Cited

Ashby, Ross. 1957. Introduction to Cybernetics. London: Chapman & Hall. Chamayou, Gregoire. 2015. Theory of the Drone. Translated by Janet Lloyd. New York: The New Press. Federal Aviation Administration. 2018. “Integration Pilot Program Awardees.” Last accessed on 2018-06-01, https://www.faa. gov/uas/programs_partnerships/uas_integration_pilot_program/awardees/. Gregory, Derek. 2014. “Drone Geographies,” Radical Philosophy 183, no. 1:7–19. Halpern, Orit and Mitchell, Robert and Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. 2017. “The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique,” Greyroom 68, no. 68: 106-129.

Heidegger, Martin. 1993. “Building Dwelling Thinking” in: Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins. Illman, Paul. 2016. Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge. Oklahoma City: United States Department of Transportation. Lindgren, Adrienne. 2018. “Smart City Policy Makers.” Panel discussion, Uber Elevate Summit, Los Angeles, CA, May 8–9. Martin, Reinhold. 2016. The Urban Apparatus: Mediapolotics and the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Picon, Antoine. 2015. Smart Cities: a spatialised intelligence. Chichester; West Sussex: Wiley.

Competing Aerial Imaginaries

Pietsch, Wolfgang and Halpern, Orit and Calvillo, Nerea and LeCavalier, Jesse. 2013. “Test Bed Urbanism,” Public Culture 25 , no. 2:272–306. Santala, Susanna. 2015. “Laboratory for a New Architecture: The Airport Terminal, Eero Saarinen and the Historiography of Modern Architecture.” Ph.D.diss, University of Helsinki. Sonja Düppleman. 2014. Flights of imagination: aviation, landscape, design. Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Wright, Frank Lloyd. 1932. The Disappearing City. New York: William Farquhar Payson.

Competing Aerial Imaginaries

*Dronesphere Colloquium* 2019/02/23

Simon Rabyniuk Thesis Research 2018-19

Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design University of Toronto

supported by the Howarth-Wright Fellowship