Computer-Aided Perspectives of Britain’s Modern Industrial Landscape

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Abstract

Images of landscape have long been a critical tool in communicating resistance to industrial developments in the British countryside. During the first two decades after 1945—a period that saw the accelerated transformation of Britain’s countryside into a modern industrial landscape—such arguments found new graphical expressions in cartoons, photographs, and moving images. In this paper, I discuss a particular type of computer-generated graphic that gained popularity among landscape stakeholders in 1960s Britain, a graphic meant to communicate, not what a landscape would look like, but how much of it would change as a consequence of a proposed development. After 1965,this diagram was increasingly used to make arguments both for and against industrial developments, including power stations, power lines, coal mines, and motorways. My paper illustrates how the adoption of digital computers by a certain professional group, helped its members build expertise by reconfiguring difficult problems of visuality, perception, and land development as conditions of visibility that would be expressed and measured with numbers and quantities. I show that these computer programs were deliberately designed, and technically configured, to aid the agendas of Britain’s statutory industrial corporations but that, despite these intentions, the technology was soon adopted also by independent organizations and community groups that actively opposed the industrial schemes. Specifically, I examine visual arguments presented at public inquiries into proposals for power transmission lines, demonstrating that a standardized graphical language and replicable process of calculation did little to ensure consensus and a shared understanding of the computed results.

Author

• Moa Karolina Carlsson, University of Edinburgh