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.

The Aerial Perspective

Cultural landscapes can be documented by aerial photography. When aerial images are shot at oblique angles and at relatively low altitudes, the images show land and buildings together, entwining the natural and the constructed elements. Aerial images can capture the preserved parts of a town's cultural landscape, and can also help identify the threatened parts and the shape of land use conflicts, present and potential. Low-level, oblique-angle pictures of many parts of the town can establish a more complete visual inventory than ground-level shots. They can show inaccessible places, such as wetlands or steep terrain. They can reveal usually hidden sites, such as dumps or gated communities. If shot at altitudes from 1000 to 2000 feet, they can show facades as well as site massing. They convey the vast scale typical of twenty-first century development, and can bring up-to-the-minute data on the progress of sprawl. And, best of all, they are understood by people without technical training, in a way that zoning maps, zoning codes, satellite surveys, and traditional site plans are not.

While citizens struggle to articulate the historic character of their towns, or the spatial qualities that make them unique, aerial photographs show scale issues in a coherent way.(4) If activist citizens are members of architectural preservation groups, they can move up in scale, from mullions to major roads. If they belong to conservation groups or environmental organizations, they can move toward understanding the combination of natural and built forms, from wildlife habitats to housing typologies. The aerial photograph shows common ground, but it is taken from an unfamiliar angle. It opens discussion and helps sustain it.

Aerial Photography and Visualization

Recent books dealing with "visioning" and "visualization" have argued the need for presenting spatial issues to the general public. Both architects and planners have highly specialized, impenetrable jargon (related to stylistic issues in architecture and to zoning law in planning) which discourage public discussion. When architects and planners attempt to connect at public meetings or "charrettes" they often bring visual aids that help for an hour or two. Visual preference surveys are popular.(5) Scale models are great--but cumbersome, and expensive to build with detailed facades and movable parts. Hand-drawn bird's eye views (axonometric drawings), and digital programs that simulate them, can show development alternatives, but are limited in how real they seem. Technical staff are needed to draw and manipulate them. When practitioners go away, often the visualization tools go with them.

Aerial photography has not yet been developed in the United States as an important aid to citizen involvement in planning and preservation efforts because of its expense and inaccessibility. The technique began with wet-plate cameras used by photographers in hot air balloons in the mid-nineteenth century. They shot cities such as Paris and Boston, a dangerous trade if the balloons crashed. By World War I, aerial photography was tied to airplanes as a military reconnaissance tool.(6) By the later twentieth century, that reconnaissance model was applied to land surveys. A fixed camera in a plane flying at a single altitude would shoot large, high resolution 9 by 9 negatives in black and white. These were taken at 90 degrees to the ground, and were not easy to read. This was always an expensive format as well as a rigid one, and any shift to color photography only increased the expense of reproduction.

Better images for a non-technical audience come from professional photographers who fly small planes, zooming in at oblique angles and varying altitudes, using 35mm cameras and different lenses. The format is versatile and more expressive. Developers and architects have often commissioned some costly, low-altitude aerial pictures to show existing conditions before presenting a project. Planners have also used these images, especially in Europe, but usually filed them in the office.(7) Color aerial photographs in books or planning reports remain expensive to reproduce and distribute.

At this moment, aerial photography is becoming much more affordable and accessible because of the way that computers can interact with digitized aerial images. It is still expensive for a pilot to fly with a hand-held camera, and it is still true that audiences enjoy having an expert present to discuss aerial images. However, the cost of creating websites is decreasing, as well as the time that is required to download and view their contents. Aerial photographs can now be studied by the citizenry at large, since a small town library, an educational institution, a citizen organization, or a planning office can host a website with dozens of aerial color photographs. The potential to contrast aerial images of a town with aerial images of other towns allows for many lessons in land use (bad practice, good practice, better practice, best practice). Aerial images can also be tied to GIS parcel maps containing data about topics ranging from vacant lands to historic structures or environmental conditions, as well as to traditional planning documents such as zoning maps and written plans. Aerials can also be paired with a broad range of older maps, images, and documents for public history.(8) Citizens can access them for hours at home or in small groups, as well as with planners or historians in larger public settings. This flexibility allows citizens time to absorb and discuss complex spatial information and to integrate local knowledge with new images in order to evaluate development proposals.

The historic town of Guilford offers an experiment in making aerial photography and cultural landscape history available to citizens and policy makers. Founded in 1639, Guilford occupies about fifty square miles of land, stretching from beaches and rocky coves along Long Island Sound to salt marshes and fields inland and high bluffs in the northern end of town. Its population was stable at about 5,000 from the mid-eighteenth century until the 1960s, when Interstate 95 made the town more accessible to New Haven and other Connecticut cities. It has grown to about 20,000 as a prosperous part of exurbia.(9) State data shows it to be 96 percent white and solidly middle class, with per capita income in 1998 at $32,841. Housing units are 89.7percent single family, and the average house price in 1996 was $196,553.(10)

At the center of the town is a splendid, large village green of almost eight acres , surrounded by four churches, many small shops and historic houses (mostly now used as offices), as well as the Guilford Free Library and the Town Hall.(11) High school graduation takes place on the Green, as well as an annual parade before the harvest fair, reminiscent of older processions of the trades. In an era when the "New England town" is routinely reinvented as kitsch in theme parks, malls, and themed restaurants, Guilford offers the real thing. But Guilford is also engaged with the automobile culture that prevails in most of the 169 cities and towns in Connecticut.(12) Both nationally and statewide, most new commercial real estate development comes in the form of low-density, low-quality buildings, designed for rapid depreciation, surrounded by acres of unrelieved parking, tied to locations around freeway off-ramps. The Connecticut Department of Transportation (DOT) is relentless in its push for more paving--more lanes on highways, bigger access ramps, wider arterials--the environment that architectural critic Jane Holtz Kay, with an eye to the paving lobby, calls "asphalt nation."(13)

The scale and beauty of a historic town or historic district 350 years in the making can be destroyed in half a year by cheap, inappropriately sized, automobile-oriented construction. Guilford has over 450 preserved buildings dated between 1639 and 1940, including one of the largest groups of eighteenth century houses in the United States. There are four National Register historic districts: the Green (also a local historic district), plus North Guilford, Clapboard Hill, and Leete's Island Road. All are significant for their landscapes as well as their buildings. Guilford is also home to three exits off I-95. Traffic is on the increase and bad projects flourish in a good economy. Which side is winning? The town founded in 1639 or the asphalt nation of 2000?

One Landscape, Two Kinds of Leadership

The Guilford Preservation Association (GPA) has provided strong leadership on traditional architectural preservation for many years, supporting the establishment of the town center local Historic District, four National Register Districts, and the sponsorship of the 1986 Master Plan for Preservation and Scenic Conservation, updated in 1995.(14) This plan won an award as a model for Connecticut. In Guilford, architectural preservation has energized citizens to appreciate and protect historic buildings, to study their styles, to honor their fine details and materials, to develop sophisticated plans for reuse. The town has preserved an excellent building stock: saltboxes and colonials made to last, with massive central chimneys, double doors and twelve-over-twelve-windows, often accompanied by old barns and sheds, perennial gardens, and mature trees. For decades the focus was on architecture. Now, colonial architecture buffs in the GPA can use cultural landscape history to extend their expertise about buildings and historic districts. They are engaging with the entire town in a quest for tougher zoning and better quality economic development, and better design as ways of protecting the integrity of what has already been saved, especially in the town center.

The town also has strong environmental leadership, with groups such as the Conservation Commission and the Guilford Land Conservation Trust (GLCT) committed to assessing and protecting natural landscapes. In 1999, Guilford won an award for the best Conservation Commission in Connecticut. The Conservation Commission has led the way with developing the town's GIS system, and has worked hard to acquire lands for open space, especially in the northern part of town, and to defend wetlands. A cultural landscape approach suggests environmentalists extend their expertise on the natural environment to engage the built environment, since pressures to build badly in the denser parts of town affect their overall goals for protected natural landscapes and wildlife habitats. Better road and tract design can increase access to open space areas that are already protected, and those that may be added.

Images of Landscape History

Guilford started with a beautiful and varied natural landscape. The shore is dotted with many small islands and pink granite outcroppings along the Sound, as well as sandy beaches.Saltmarshes behind the shore and along the East and West Rivers add character inland and make this a boater's heaven. One can still see a little commercial fishing----docks, sea walls, boathouses, boats.

The meadows, fields, hills, and bluffs in the northern part of town, plus the lakes, streams, and wetlands offer diverse habitats for wildlife. Upon this natural landscape are impressed the traces of cultivation--old stone walls, field patterns, orchards, farmhouses, barns. As the town developed, houses were created side-by-side with churches, burying grounds, and eventually, foundries, small factories, and shops. Much is well-preserved.

However, development after 1870, especially in the commercial parts of town, was not always created with the same investment of resources and care. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, the railroad began bringing tourists to Guilford, and then, in 1910, the trolley arrived. Although the railroad still runs a few times a day, the railroad station has recently been demolished.The trolley is gone. Buses provide the scarce public transport. By the first third of the twenieth century, the automobile, the truck,
and the bus were changing patterns access and building. Gas stations appeared, along with private garages behind houses. In the 1920s, the Boston Post Road was shifted to take automobile activity straight from York Street to Clapboard Hill, away from the Green--a very wise decision. Designated Route 1, this road was nicknamed the "hot dog trail," a strip full of service stations and hot dog stands. In 1953 Guilford got its first mall, the Guilford Plaza. By 1958, cars arrived in greater numbers with the opening of Interstate 95.

Suburban subdivisions tripled the size of the town by 1980. These tracts included houses with historic features such as hip roofs, but traditional site planning was abandoned for auto-oriented cul-de-sacs and large-lot zoning. Sometimes tracts crowded wetlands.

Nevertheless, the town retains a recognizable historic center and delightful scenic areas with a rural feeling. The Green itself, with its successful mix of churches, houses and small shops, offers everyday pleasures involving the experience of historic buildings and landscapes at the pedestrian scale. Looking at the Green from the air, the parking lots call for attention to buffering the district, protecting its edges from the pressure from automotive activities. Historic Fair Street has a mix of wonderful houses. But the context is not good. The 1855 Guilford Institute (the former Guilford High School and then Shoreline Times Building) is a resource, but the Boston Post Road (Route 1) is eroding the edge. Between State and River Streets, it is even clearer how the residential scale outside the historic district, which adds to the town character, is threatened. One side is holding, one is gone. Similarly, from the air, it is clear that the beautiful North Guilford Meeting House Hill historic district did not have enough buffer. First came the modernist Melissa Jones elementary school, too big and too close, and then the "Meetinghouse" subdivision.

Many Connecticut towns once looked more like Guilford. Farms have been chopped into large-lot subdivisions in Durham. Old houses are being torn down and huge McMansions erected in Greenwich, Westport, and other towns in Fairfield County as people try to isolate themselves on ever-larger acreages.

Pressure for overscale retail development is bearing down on Guilford from nearby Branford. Exit 56 in Branford, across the town line from Guilford, demonstrates sprawl out of control. Many Guilford citizens spoke against a proposed free-floating zone that would permit huge projects between the Guilford side of the town line and Exit 57. Around Exits 57, 58 and Exit 59, actual and potential problems of scale are visible. Proposals for rezoning industrial land to attract an outlet mall at Exit 57 were entertained by the town's own Economic Development Commission in 1999, until two hundred citizens turned out to say no. A Super 8 motel, near Exit 59, received a special permit, but a citizens' group has started litigation. Commercial real estate applications are up--from the oversized, cheap, funky project on the corner of State Street and Route 1, to the oversized, modern one approved at Exit 59. Both detract from town character. Exit 59 is starting to look like Exit 56. To stop overscale commercial real estate proposals, the town needs new kinds of tough land use regulations and design review processes, with a new focus on enforcement. The pressure for sprawl can only grow. Signals from the state government to developers are often pro-development.(15) Governor Rowland has plans to widen I-95 from New Haven to Branford, despite protests from the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. This will increase pressure for sprawl in Guilford.

Public Debates : No Growth, Cute Growth, Growth-As-Punishment, and
Pro-Growth

In our era, the New England town is copied in theme parks, new subdivisions, and shopping malls. Guilford is a real town, unique and irreplaceable. It is not simply a local historic resource, it is important to the region and the nation as a fine example of a New England town with a traditional village green, and a second center in the northern part of town. Public interpretation--creating public contexts to explain what is being preserved, and why--is therefore essential to Guilford's future. It is the key to citizen support, and also to reaching outside audiences for Guilford's historic cultural landscape. There will be heated debates about land use and the town's future. (After all, there were three branches of the Congregational church by 1844, one of them Abolitionist, illustrating a healthy tradition of dissent.) In time, every citizen, including all students in the schools, should be able to access and analyze detailed information about where the town's historic resources are located and how they are used.

Public planning needs to be controversial, needs to be acted out, to be really engaging. A couple of extreme positions on preservation will probably be proposed. One is no-growth, forbidding all new construction in the hope of turning the whole town into a museum. Another is what we might call cute growth, requiring that all new development be in historicist styles. New Englanders should be particularly careful not to mimic historic buildings and landscapes in the routine creation of commercial real estate as pastiche. New buildings that are compatible with historic ones are always in scale. They are usually compatible in proportions, and in quality of construction and of materials. They are not necessarily designed in neo-colonial styles, or decked out with reproduction details from the local lumberyard.

Another extreme position is growth-as-punishment, to be against all preservation, to dismiss the unique historic landscape of Guilford as unworthy of preservation because of the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite who established the town, and groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) who help sustain the memory of the founders. The town has its roots in a Puritan culture, and the Congregational Church remains important. Towns of this kind were often small ethnic enclaves, resistant to outsiders. Guilford is more inclusive now of Catholics and Jews, of citizens from Irish and German and Italian backgrounds, than at its start. A high school history project found 23 different ethnic groups settled in the town as it grew. One strategy that has worked in other places to gather broad support for preservation is to interpret the lives and work of Irish carpenters and ditch diggers, Italian stonemasons and quarry workers , and Latino horticultural workers as part of a broader presentation of a town's legacy.(16) In a town that is 96 percent white, this would be a small beginning.

Another variation of the pro-growth, anti-preservation stance is to insist that Guilford is no longer a small town but part of a metropolitan area that has remained isolated too long, and therefore should accept all new urban-scale development as a part of an automobile-oriented economy in the region and the nation. This is a passive stance that tends to leave the town vulnerable in the face of developers and international franchise chains and businesses such as McDonalds (already present) or Wal-Mart. This position, however, points up the problems of preservationists relying on the lack of public transportation, a sewer avoidance policy, and the high cost of housing to keep Guilford's densities low. These are old-fashioned and ineffective measures in the face of determined commercial developers. "Smart growth" strategies suggest that up-to-date zoning, stiffer requirements for design quality, and strict limits on size of roadside buildings tend to make developers either spend more or go elsewhere. The planning solutions are beyond the scope of this paper, but the debates sketched are typical, and suggest how no-growth or pro-growth strategies relate to debates about preservation and public history.

Public Interpretation of Local History

If Guilford develops tougher policies on automobile-oriented land use, demands new projects of higher design quality to preserve its historic scale and character, and works for greater diversity, citizens also need to consider whether or not there is sufficient interpretation of history in public places. Ordinary citizens and visitors have more access to the Green, the Harbor, and the public beaches than to the interiors of many privately owned historic houses. There are four house museums, including the Whitfield House, the Hyland House, the Griswold House, and the Dudley Farm. Guides to the Westwoods Trails or the architecture around the Green are available for purchase in the local bookstore. Hikes through preserved open space areas are led by the GLCT. A few free leaflets are found in the Community Center, Library, and Town Hall. Citizens may find the buildings and trails quite easily, but not fully understand them. A stranger coming to town would not find it obvious where to go or why. If Guilford citizens want the town to be considered a regional or a national treasure more coordinated efforts are needed to make public interpretation accessible.

As ever, resources are scarce and priorities must be selected. Every person in town, young and old, needs to be able to define loved places, define appropriate growth, justify aesthetic decisions, articulate environmental ethics. All have to be involved in prioritizing town needs for preservation, maintenance, and public interpretation. Ultimately, the historic character of towns like Guilford must be understood, represented, and defended in ways that stimulate larger, democratic processes of engaged citizenship, or the historic scale and pedestrian areas of Guilford, and similar older suburbs and small towns, will disappear.

So, can this town be saved? In spring 2000, a revised town plan is under discussion. A committee has been formed to study the problems of Route 1, and consultants are working on zoning review and design guidelines. Two new preservation groups have been formed recently, Protect Our Guilford, and Guilford Vision Project, while older organizations like GPA and GLCT have greatly increased their level of town activity. An Independent party has formed around an anti-sprawl platform. A hundred people turn out for Planning and Zoning meetings that used to attract little participation. This aerial photography and cultural landscape history website is another tool, designed by Barbara Rockenbach, and hosted by Yale University's Art and Architecture Library, to bring photos and research to the public.

It is too soon to say what Guilford's future may hold. In 1935, the architect Le Corbusier wrote, "The airplane indicts."(17) He claimed that anyone flying over old French towns would see the need to tear down and rebuild to his modernist designs. We suggest the opposite. Aerial photography with a hand-held camera heightens awareness of unique cultural landscapes by documenting land use in an accessible way. Because of the Web, these images are available. They can help architecture buffs and environmentalists, citizens and specialists, visualize common ground.

Abstract

Low-altitude, oblique-angle aerial photography offers easily understood documentation of town character and cultural landscape history. Aerial photography shows scale relationships well, and is especially useful for visualizing resources in older towns. Guilford, Connecticut, founded in 1639, offers an example of a town with four historic districts threatened by automobile-scale sprawl. Our website makes broad dissemination of color aerial photographs affordable. It carries extensive text and maps as well to encourage debate on land use among citizens, planners, and elected officials.

Authors

Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. She is an urban historian and architect, the author of several award-winning books on the history of American cities, most recently her account of downtown Los Angeles, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (The MIT Press, 1995). She serves on the Boston Post Road Design Study Committee in Guilford, Connecticut. (P.O. Box 208342, New Haven, CT 06520. dolores.hayden@yale.edu)

Alex MacLean is an aerial photographer and aviator whose photographs of American landscapes have been shown in many American museums and galleries. He published Look at the Land: Aerial Reflections on America (Rizzoli, 1993) and, with James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Yale, 1996). (Landslides, 33 Richdale Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02140. maclean@tiac.net)

Acknowlegments

This research project was supported by an initial grant from the Graham Foundation in 1998, and by subsequent financial support from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and from Yale University. Special thanks to Rosalind Greenstein and Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute, Ruth Knack of Planning, Shirley Girioni of Guilford Preservation Association, Gerry Silbert of the Guilford Conservation Commission, Marnie Sandweiss of Amherst College, and Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery for their advice and encouragement. Thanks to Peter Marris of Yale University for editorial help. And thanks to architects Fabrizio Gallanti and Stefano Boeri at the Milan Triennale; art historian Bob Bruegmann at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle, NEH summer institute on Built Environment and Culture; and planner Lawrence Vale and urban historian Sam Bass Warner at MIT. All of them invited preliminary papers touching on some of these issues.

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