Out of thin air:Vertiplaces

Whether territorializing sky, land, or water, the system-based nature of infrastructure requires comprehensive planning projects that displace local forms of knowledge and practice: anthropologist James Scott conceptualizes these processes as “thin simplifications” (Scott 1998). This paper studies the planning process currently scaling commercial drones from test bed experiments into a national system in the United States. It analyzes an architectural proposal in a series of documents and studies published between 2019 and 2022 by NASA and adjacent drone mobility actors. These definitional documents set out performance characteristics, concepts for operation, and approaches to automation for “vertiplaces”: a portmanteau describing ports for drones.<br/><br/>Scott’s concepts of legibility, standardization, and simplification provide a theoretical frame for reading these documents. Thin simplification describes cultural, spatial, or economic impositions onto a place, including media infrastructure, for which vertiplaces are one example. These projects, most often planned by a state, reflect an aim for an idealized social order; Scott documents their past failure due to ignorance or arrogance on the part of their planners towards local and regional variation.<br/><br/>Not every urban scheme meets Scott’s criteria for thin simplification, and here the process of planning an infrastructural project, the expansiveness of vision, and the disposition of approaches are paramount. For Scott, acts of thin simplification combine the material reconfiguration of the urban, a high modernist logic, and authoritarianism, which are recognizable in the vertiplaces proposal. While steeped in technical language and specifications, the vertiplace planning documents are acts of world-building and have broad implications for redesigning the built environment. Through analyzing the planning process defining standards for commercial drone infrastructure, this article poses a series of questions about the social and spatial implications of this spatial revolution.