How will drones affect the way you live your life in the city? Will their increasing presence in the ‘grid’ have a direct effect on your day-to-day routines, routes, and privacy? According to the Center for the Study of the Drone, drones are changing the nature of aerial surveillance. Not your average helicopters and commercial airliners, drones are more sizeably manageable, less noisy, cheaper to fly, and their versatility and mobility allow them to maintain surveillance for maybe even 24 hour periods.
Our planning guidelines
There May Be a Strong Case for Drone Delivery in Some Environments
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In urban settings and with the drone designs being put forward, increasing the percentage of packages delivered by drone can increase the energy consumed per package delivered substantially — by up to an order of magnitude in some cases. However, the energy per drone-delivered package can be significantly reduced by having many drone centres distributed throughout a city or region instead of using one centralized centre.
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Requiring many drone centres has the additional benefits of reducing the size of the fleet, aerial congestion, and the privacy and noise concerns that overhead drones create.
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In some environments, the adverse effects (including energy consumption) appear to be at a level low enough that, when combined with expedited delivery timelines, there can be a strong case for drone delivery.
Recommendation
Drone delivery systems should be encouraged by policy in some situations and discouraged in others. It is possible to roughly determine whether a set of conditions for a given city falls into the encourage or discourage categories by using low-cost analyses, such as those provided in this report. The same analyses can be used to provide or clarify options for reducing adverse impacts while retaining benefits as well. Along those lines, it appears that there can be substantial benefits to many parameters of interest by implementing policies that promote the use of multiple drone centres to service large cities as opposed to a single, centralized centre.
Drones, however, would not be hidden and separated from the city, but instead, occupy the airspace above and around us. This means that architects' response to the promise of “unprecedented multidimensional urban space” and the need for “buildings that work to facilitate drone navigation and communication” could lead to a new typology entirely--potentially even in ways more definitive and integrated than train stations did in the past.
The central space becomes the focus of human habitation, cushioned from the unwanted conditions outside, a spatial solution working in drone-human symbiosis.
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Relationship with a city’s existing rail, road and human networks. Not only does this allow for fast connection with the transit centers of delivery companies - with drones able to use the arteries of highways just as wheeled vehicles do - it also allows the project to be easily adapted to other highway locations.