Organisers' description :
As a technique of representation, aerial photography has often been associated with “top-down” urban planning programs initiated by twentieth-century modern capitalist states. This book seeks to demonstrate that, in fact, the new social conception of space developed by French urban sociologist Henri Lefebvre and others in the 1960s and 1970s was actually engendered with the aid of this novel twentieth-century tool of vision. Beginning in the 1930s, French social scientists working in a variety of different academic fields used aerial photos to investigate the spaces of human habitation in French colonies as well as in France. The technique, which was closely linked to the French colonial state and military, helped them to see the connection between spatial organization and social organization. After World War II, these anthropological theories of spatial organization were turned back onto the metropole. By the 1960s and 1970s, as we will see, the anthropological critique developed in the 1930s had become a full-fledged attack on contemporary urbanism.
