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as an organic unit. Paraphrasing an old saying, “the photogrammetrist has
failed to see the city for looking at the houses”. As a result valuable data have
been lost which he should have been able to contribute to urban evaluation.
The city planner on his part, while considering the city as a whole and
changing unit, has relied chiefly upon administration reports, tax returns,
field sampling, and other statistical minutia. By the very mass of these data,
the accumulation and integration of information is necessarily slow, and by
the time planning reports are published, usually a matter of years, the basic
data have frequently become obsolete. The planner has need of the economy
and speed with which many of the answers to his problems can be obtained
from aerial photography.
All of the foregoing points to the fact that the inherent nature of aerial
photography in bringing large areas of the earth's surface into the planning
office, is admirably suited for overall analysis and planning purposes.
What appears to be needed however, is a means of translating into the
language of the photogrammetrist, the considerations of the urban planner,
the urban engineer, the urban geographer and sociologist, the health and
sanitation authority, the architect, the real estate developer, the market
analyst, the traffic surveyor, and the insurance actuary, as well as the subject
matter of many other fields of urban study; that is to relate these considera-
tions into forms which can be identified and measured by their special
displacements.
Also needed is some method whereby all of these varied interests can be
reduced to a common denominator which would make identification of
related features in aerial photography a workable procedure.
While at first glance this appears to be a tremendous job, it is in fact quite
simple, and it is to present recent developments of this methodology that I
address this assembly. I do not presume to present a patent medicine which
will at once solve all problems of urban planning, but rather to present the
current level of progress in interpretation of various urban data from photo-
graphy and to indicate a line of thought along which further study can
profitably be made.
Let us consider now some of the basic concepts in urban planning as
they relate to their special aspects. These in turn form a logical sequence upon
which may be based the photo study of urban problems.
Let us also bear in mind, that the considerations of all urban planners are
fundamentally statistical and that these statistics represent areal distributions.
These distributions are legion, and all urban planning reports are filled with
them. A good example of such data may be seen in the National Park and
Planning Commission Report of 1950, on Washington, D.C. Such distribu-
tions may involve quantities of water supply, traffic, disease, delinquency,
income and other values too numerous to mention. In essence, each is a
comparison of different proportions within various areas of the city. These
proportions may be between the larger functional areas, (for example an
evaluation of the traffic, or water supply, or electric power requirements, of
the central business district, as compared with industrial or residential areas).
Furthermore, these statistics relate specifically to such types of sections as first
commercial, second commerical, apartment house areas, slum areas, and so
on. Consider also that what is typical of apartment house areas in one part of
