Aerial Photography in Community Debates on Land Use

In the past ten years, many planners and designers promoting "smart growth" and "new urbanism" have suggested how to build for the twenty-first century, often advocating a return to the pedestrian scale of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with narrower streets, wider sidewalks, higher densities, and compact site plans. Ironically, many heavily publicized projects, such as Prairie Crossing, Illinois, and Celebration, Florida, are new suburban real estate developments in historicist styles, rather than preservation projects. Meanwhile, real towns full of historic houses surrounding village greens are often neglected. New techniques in aerial photography offer ways to document historic buildings and landscapes as a part of visualizing "smart growth" in places like the town of Guilford, Connecticut, founded in 1639. This paper suggests how to join history and aerial photography to make a detailed portrait of a town's cultural landscape accessible to citizens, public officials, and land use planners. (1)

Analyzing and Preserving Cultural Landscapes

The cultural landscape is the combination of natural land forms and human interventions (including buildings) that defines a particular place. Cultural landscape is both an emerging field of historical scholarship and a new approach to the preservation of landscapes, towns, and buildings.(2) Traditionally considered as separate fields, architectural history emphasizes aesthetic decisions concerning major buildings by well-known architects, urban history deals with political and economic development or the history of planning, and environmental history analyzes the use of natural resources such as land, air, water. Cultural landscape history is a broader way of analyzing architectural, economic, and environmental forces together, to look at how a society shapes its space over time.

In the geographical tradition, cultural landscape history begins by defining the uniqueness of a particular place, or what the British call "Local Distinctiveness," the vernacular traditions of land division, plantings, and house types that are tied to local topography and natural materials.(3) It documents the historical process of people shaping space over time and the larger economic forces promoting a town's growth, destruction, or preservation. Cultural landscape history involves research on everyone who deals with land and built space, and suggests the broadest roles that people play--indigenous residents and settlers, politicians, public and private developers, workers in the building trades, and contemporary residents, as well as conservationists and preservationists, planners, architects, and landscape architects. Complementing architectural preservation, which usually focuses on significant buildings, cultural landscape preservation attempts to deal with the wider scale of settlements, considering all of society, rich and poor, men, women, and children, and the places people live and work.

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