Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces, and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland
In the following blog post, Dennis Pauschinger and Francisco Klauser share the underlying ideas behind their article, “Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces, and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland,” which was recently published in the journal Surveillance & Society.
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Over the last few years, professional civil drone usage has increased considerably. In different professional sectors such as aerial photography, farming, or police work, drones have become a working tool that opened up a myriad of new possibilities for professionals to renew, reinvent, and complement their working routines with the technology. Our paper in Surveillance & Society entitled “Aerial Politics of Visibility: Actors, Spaces and Drivers of Professional Drone Usage in Switzerland” sheds light upon these recent developments with regard to Switzerland.
The empirical data that we used in the article is the result of a quantitative online survey conducted among professional drone users in the country. As part of a research agenda on volumetric spatial thought and drone technology developed in the project “Power and Space in the Drone Age” in the Institute of Geography in Neuchâtel, the survey was conducted in the second half of 2017 and included public and private actors. The survey was sent out to over 3,000 respondents, and we received 922 valid answers which gave our study a considerable positive response rate of 32%. This makes the present survey the first systematic and comprehensive study of professional drone usage in Switzerland, providing a detailed picture of the phenomenon, including its different spatial dimensions, risks, opportunities, and expected future evolution. Overall, 432 representatives from public institutions and 490 representatives from private companies completed the survey.
If surveillance is understood as a process which is routinised and systematic, our data shows that civil drones are exactly the opposite
The major conceptual message in the paper is that against many writings in the surveillance community, we wanted to mitigate and nuance the argument that drones can best be conceptualised as new urban surveillance tools. If surveillance is understood as a process which is routinised and systematic, our data shows that civil drones are exactly the opposite and rather used spontaneously and with a considerable degree of flexibility. We therefore advance the idea to theorise drones as a technology that connects power and visibility in completely new ways and that the technology is best appreciated as powerful socio-technical tools that convey specific politics of visibility.
Beside the fact that drones are not used for systematic and routine surveillance purposes, there are two outcomes worth highlighting that show how drones are transforming professional sectors in Switzerland. The first important outcome was that professional drone usage — even from police departments — is indeed not an urban phenomenon, but a matter of the rural. Within these rural spaces, drones are being used to enable and establish new ways of seeing, open up new professional fields, produce totally new ways of collaborations and commercial possibilities, and mobilise a myriad of different actors in these new fields.
The second result that we want to shed light upon here, is that the participants of our survey have indicated how drones have truly transformed and integrated their everyday working routines. Strikingly, most of the public and private participants have said that they would not use the airspace without the drone and once they use a drone, that the technology has become indispensable for their organisation. In addition, both private and public actors agree or somewhat agree that drone technology enables them to develop novel services. In other words, drone technology is providing professional users with the power to discover not only the air as a working space but triggers new creative ways of shaping professional sectors like aerial photography, filmmaking or police work.
We hope that we can contribute with the paper to both academic and practitioner discussions around the ever-growing civil drone usage and are looking forward to possible new research and developments in the field.
