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Increasing urbanisation and a better understanding of the negative health effects of air pollution have accelerated the use of Internet of Things (IoT)-based air quality sensors. Low-cost and low-power sensors are now readily available and commonly deployed by individuals and community groups. However, there are a wide range of such IoT devices in circulation that differently focus on problems of sensor validation, data reliability, or accessibility. In this paper, we present AirKit, which was developed as an integrated and open source "social IoT technology". AirKit enables a comprehensive approach to citizen-sensing air quality through several integrated components: (1) the Dustbox 2.0, a particulate matter sensor; (2) Airsift, a data analysis platform; (3) a reliable and automatic remote firmware update system; (4) a "Data Stories" method and tool for communicating citizen data; and (5) an AirKit logbook that provides a guide for designing and running air quality projects, along with instructions for building and using AirKit components. Developed as a social technology toolkit to foster open processes of research co-creation and environmental action, Airkit has the potential to generate expanded engagements with IoT and air quality by improving the accuracy, legibility and use of sensors, data analysis and data communication. ; This research was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 313347, "Citizen Sensing and Environmental Practice: Assessing Participatory Engagements with Environments through Sensor Technologies", and from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (ERC Grant Agreement n. 779921), "AirKit: Citizen Sense Air Monitoring Kit". The University of Cambridge provided additional support through the ESRC Impact Acceleration Account (2020) for enabling impact.

New forms of ecological citizenship are emerging. As people wake up to an ecologically damaged world, while simultaneously experiencing the unsteady ground from which to imagine such a world, they start to take up low-cost technology to speculatively sense our surrounding ecologies. This article brings together narrative theory and environmental humanities while close-reading such a citizen sensing practice, that of Sounding Soil (2017—now). At stake in this sensing project is the elemental alterity of soil ecology that helps us to focalize a clear narrative distance between human voice and non-human mood. Going outside the analytical contours of normative environmental discourse and the ecocritical tradition, this article argues for the critical importance of narrative distance in sensing an ecology, because it subverts a logic of rendering the elemental as commensurable. How we pursue citizen sensing practices, therefore, is always premised on embodied, immersive, and discursively syncretic modes of speculative meaning-making: a sometimes uncomfortable but always critically improvisational engagement with elemental emergence. The dialectical tension between intimate sensing and narrative distance in Sounding Soil is no paradoxical story: it instead formalizes planetary narratives in which the ecology of soil materializes as a figure of alterity, not reducible to human voice.

AbstractRome is a complex metropolis. The city faces the challenge of imagining and shaping an inclusive and sustainable future for its inhabitants. On several occasions, city policies and interventions have not met the goal of preserving environmental resources. For their part, the inhabitants of Rome tend to doubt the ability of institutions to take care of the city's resources. We focus on civic environmental monitoring led by the local independent association A Sud, aimed at assessing the environmental status of two of the city's rivers. From a review of applicable literature on governance, environmental and social justice and climate urbanism, we build a theoretical frame to guide our analysis. We inquire how civic monitoring in a complex city can benefit urban resource governance and foster urban transitions. We also explore the extent to which these initiatives have the potential to inform or have actually informed the scientists and policymakers responsible for designing city adaptations. Our analysis demonstrates that citizen-gathered data can enrich the scientific knowledge base and trigger claims for interventions, bringing in information on local issues often overlooked by competent institutions. The initiatives also improved individual and collective attitudes towards the city and its resources, stimulating a sense of care and a watchful citizenship.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an emerging and growing industry that is having considerable effects on environments and health. Yet fracking often lacks environmental regulations that might be understood as governmental forms of care. In some locations in the US, citizens have taken up environmental monitoring as a way to address this perceived absence of care, and to evidence harm in order to argue for new infrastructures of care. This article documents the practices of residents engaged in monitoring air pollution near fracking sites in the US, as well as the participatory and practice-based research undertaken by the Citizen Sense research project to develop monitoring kits for residents to use and test over a period of seven months. Citizen sensing practices for monitoring air pollution can constitute ways of expressing care about environments, communities and individual and public health. Yet practices for documenting and evidencing harm through the ongoing collection of air pollution data are also speculative attempts to make relevant these unrecognised and overlooked considerations of the need for care. Working with the concept of speculation, this article advances alternative notions of evidence, care and policy that attend to citizens' experiences of living in the gas fields. How do citizen sensing practices work towards alternative ways of evidencing harm? In what ways does monitoring with environmental sensors facilitate this process? And what new speculative practices emerge to challenge the uses of environmental sensors, as well as to expand the types of data gathered, along with their political impact? ; ERC 313347

Citizen sensing, or the practice of monitoring environments through low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital technologies, is often structured as an individual pursuit. The very term citizen within citizen sensing suggests that the practice of sensing is the terrain of one political subject using a digital device to monitor her or his environment to take individual action. Yet in some circumstances, citizen sensing practices are reworking the sites and distributions of environmental monitoring toward other configurations that are more multiple and collective. What are the qualities and capacities of these collective modes of sensing, and how might they shift the assumed parameters—and effectiveness—of citizen sensing? We engage with Simondon's writing to consider how a "perceptive problematic" generates collectives for feeling and responding to events (or an "affective problematic"), here through the ongoing event of air pollution. Further drawing on writing from Stengers, we discuss how the "work" of citizen sensing involves much more than developing new technologies, and instead points to the ways in which new practices, subjects, milieus, evidence, and politics are worked through as perceptive and affective commitments to making sense of and addressing the problem of pollution. ; The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 313347

Large sub-Saharan African cities are characterized by serious and persistent environmental problem of Solid Waste Management (SWM). The city of Kinshasa, in Democratic Republic of the Congo has a long lasting and major concern of SWM. More worryingly, with rapid population growth and urbanization, waste generation, both domestic and industrial, is expected to rise with great potential of health and environmental problems. Therefore, with an objective of bringing a possible solution that reduces the increasing problem of SWM, we explore in the present study the use of crowdsourcing as a possible mechanism to identify, localize, characterize solid waste landfills. The proposed approach allows (i) creating a spatial and temporal database through a participatory process to support data collection and information generation, and (ii) visualizing the spatial and temporal distribution of observations through an interactive map. Our database holds 187 observations of solid waste disposals across Kinshasa within two years with estimated volume of solid waste accounts of 587'920 m3. These observations include 61 public disposals (e.g., transit center), and 151 wild dumps, of which, 174 active and 3 inactive disposals. The approach developed in this study is a proof-of- concept and a successful implementation was achieved. Our conception and results provide new tool and mechanism to collect data and generate useful information on solid waste landfills in the city of Kinshasa that was not available before. The results of this study indicate that crowdsourcing can be a valuable mechanism to involve citizens in collecting data on solid waste landfills in the city of Kinshasa, which can be applied in similar urban cities.

AbstractOften, health is seen to be a matter of attending to individuals and their behaviour, or of studying populations in order to manage disease. However, pollution is a problem of the health of environments, as much as it is a problem of the health of bodies. To understand health and pollution, it is necessary to examine energy-intensive infrastructures and developed environments that produce air pollutants and impair ecosystems. In other words, air pollution requires approaches to health that are planetary in scope and that account for the socio-environmental processes and relations that make health possible. Planetary health is often approached as a broad analysis of earth systems. However, diverse and situated environmental practices also contribute to the formation of planetary health. This article asks how citizen-sensing practices tune into the problem of air pollution in Southeast London, and in so doing differently configure pollution and planetary health. While many sensing technologies promise to make citizens into more capable political actors through the collection of data, this research investigates how communities use sensors in distinct ways to support, activate or extend community-led projects in urban environments. Rather than citizen-sensing practices contributing to improved air quality through the abstract circulation of data, we found that environmental monitoring became enmeshed in ongoing and broader struggles to improve the health of urban environments. These practices not only challenge the official scripts of sensing devices, they also remake the usual ways of demarcating health in relation to air pollution by shifting away from individual behaviour and toward collective environmental actions. This article then asks how community proposals for urban design and action conjoin with citizen-sensing practices to generate strategies for reworking and reconstituting health toward more planetary compositions. ; ERC 313347

Interactive mobile technologies provide an emerging opportunity for citizens to engage with and enhance urban climate resilience, both as providers of locally situated data on climate variables, impacts and climate adaptation measures as well as to obtain information on local conditions and recommendations. This paper examines the process of co-designing a citizen science application for urban climate resilience in four European cities. Further, the paper studies if and how the system enables knowledge co-production to increase urban resilience following process principles for co-production of climate services and discusses the legitimacy, transparency, credibility, and relevance of the process. We further assess the role that a citizen science climate service could play as a boundary object in knowledge co-production. We draw on experiences from a co-design process that included municipal stakeholders from different sectors as well as municipal employees and civil society end-users involved in campaigns. This study identified a set of barriers and enablers for the co-design process and concludes that the CitizenSensing application can fulfil the role of a boundary object, but that the co-design process is a balancing act between navigating time constraints, including stakeholders different and changing demands and perspectives while retaining a high level of flexibility and reflexivity. ; Funding Agencies|FCT (Portugal)Portuguese Foundation for Science and TechnologyEuropean Commission [ERA4CS/0001/2016]; FORMAS (Sweden)Swedish Research Council Formas [201701719]; NWO (The Netherlands)Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)Netherlands Government [438.17.805]; RCN (Norway) [274192]; European UnionEuropean Commission [690462]

Introduction : environment as experiment in sensing technology -- Sensing an experimental forest : processing environments and distributing relations -- From moss cam to spill cam : techno-geographies of experience -- Animals as sensors : mobile organisms and the problem of milieus -- Sensing climate change and expressing environmental citizenship -- Sensing oceans and geo-speculating with a garbage patch -- Sensing air and creaturing data -- Citizen sensing in the smart and sustainable city : from environments to environmentality -- Engaging the idiot in participatory digital urbanism -- Digital infrastructures of withness : constructing a speculative city -- Conclusion : planetary computerization, revisited

Wenn BürgerInnen aktiv am Datengewinnungsprozess als zentralem Baustein empirisch ausgerichteter wissenschaftlicher Projekte teilhaben, kann dies als Beitrag zu einer offenen und bürgernahen Wissenschaft angesehen werden. Eine solche Teilhabe kann durch die Bereitstellung von technischen Werkzeugen erheblich erleichtert werden. Daher sollen Participatory Sensing als Bereitstellung von günstigen Sensoren zur Messung von Umweltparametern sowie Wearable Technologies zur Aufnahme von quantifizierten Vitaldaten und physiologischen Zuständen vorgestellt werden. Konzeptionell kann die Bereitstellung von Daten, die mit diesen Werkzeugen erhoben wurden, als Allmende verstanden werden – mit allen damit verbundenen Chancen und Risiken. Nach der Beschreibung von Beispielen aus den Bereichen von Participatory Sensing und Wearable Technologies werden zu erwartende Herausforderungen identifiziert und technisch-organisatorische Ansätze zu deren Lösung skizziert.