The View from Above: The Science of Social Space

摘要

Jeanne Haffner's The View from Above unfolds through the expert's view of various landscapes observed from the airplane. Like the camera obscura, the airplane permanently and profoundly changed embodied perspective. During World War I it offered experiments with new forms of intelligence and new strategies of surveillance. In France, military successes led to institutional training programs, and even the use of "air-mindedness" to promote French nationalism in primary schools. Books and linear text lost their exclusive hold on young imaginations. New generations of social scientists with expertise in the integration of aerial photography and traditional cartography emerged with the conviction that society could be better understood from below and from above.