Can Air Quality Citizen-Sensors Turn into Clean Air Ambassadors? Insights from a Qualitative Study

While the figure of ambassador is being increasingly called upon in the field of environmental health, its scope remains fuzzy and its success factors have been little studied. This article presents the results of a qualitative study performed over three years on a French citizen-sensor scheme for air quality. The scheme draws on volunteer citizens to measure fine particles by means of micro-sensors. Volunteers are also tasked with raising awareness in their entourage about environmental issues with the aim of changing people’s behaviour. We investigated this strategy and sought to identify the conditions that enable citizens to become effective clean air ambassadors. The scheme’s intervention logic was first reconstructed and a literature review of similar projects was conducted. Then, three surveys were carried out with the scheme’s volunteers. Each survey consisted of an observation of the volunteers’ practices and individual interviews (70 in all) in order to understand these citizen-sensors motivations and experiences, and characterize how they fulfilled their role. We concluded that, for citizen sensing, the scope and role of ambassador should be reconsidered insofar as these citizens serve as peer leaders and mediators. In this respect, we try to define the success factors for citizen-sensing-based ambassadors programmes.

Nutzer, Sammler, Entscheidungsträger? Arten der Bürgerbeteiligung in Smart Cities

ZusammenfassungDigitalisierung ist ein präsenter Faktor in vielen Städten. So existieren bereits viele Smart-City-Initiativen, bei denen Städte versuchen, ihre Prozesse durch Erfassung und Verknüpfung von Daten, oft unter Zuhilfenahme von Datenplattformen, zu optimieren. In Anbetracht der damit einhergehenden großen Investitionen und Veränderungen wird Bürgerbeteiligung als zentraler Faktor für den Erfolg solcher Initiativen betrachtet. Bisher ist allerdings nicht klar, was typische Beteiligungsformate von Smart-City-Initiativen sind und welche Rolle(n) BürgerInnen dabei einnehmen. Dieser Beitrag leitet mittels einer Literaturanalyse zu Smart Cities ein Kategorienschema zu typischen Bürgerbeteiligungsarten ab. Die Analyse ergab, dass sich Einbindung von BürgerInnen in politische Entscheidungen und bei der Entwicklung technischer Artefakte maßgeblich auf e‑Government oder Participatory Design bezieht. Im Hinblick auf die Beteiligungsarten zeigt sich, dass Makrofabriken, Living Labs und Open-Data-Plattformen häufige Ansätze sind, um BürgerInnen als Co-Creators einzubinden. Zudem werden BürgerInnen mit Citizen Sensing zur Erfassung von Daten oder Missständen einbezogen. Dabei zeigen sich sowohl aktivere, als auch eher passive Beteiligungsarten. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Einbindung von BürgerInnen häufig entweder auf eine Beteiligung an politischen Entscheidungen oder an der Entwicklung technischer Artefakte abzielt. Auch wenn keine klare Abgrenzung möglich ist, sind diese Ansätze dann eher durch e‑Government oder Participatory Design inspiriert.

Agent-Based Simulation to Measure the Effectiveness of Citizen Sensing Applications—The Case of Missing Children

Citizen sensing applications need to have a number of users defined that ensures their effectiveness. This is not a straightforward task because neither the relationship between the size of the userbase or its effectiveness is easily quantified, nor is it clear which threshold for the number of users would make the application ‘effective’. This paper presents an approach for estimating the number of users needed for location-based crowdsourcing applications to work successfully, depending on the use case, the circumstances, and the criteria of success. It circumvents various issues, ethical or practical, in performing real-world controlled experiments and tackles this challenge by developing an agent-based modelling and simulation framework. This framework is tested on a specific scenario, that of missing children and the search for them. The search is performed with the contribution of citizens being made aware of the disappearance through a mobile application. The result produces an easily reconfigurable testbed for the effectiveness of citizen sensing mobile applications, allowing the study of the marginal utility of new users of the application. The resulting framework aims to be the digital twin of a real urban scenario, and it has been designed to be easily adapted and support decisions on the feasibility, evaluation, and targeting of the deployment of spatial crowdsourcing applications.

AirKit: A Citizen-Sensing Toolkit for Monitoring Air Quality

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.

Citizen Sensing: An Action-Orientated Framework for Citizen Science

Citizen Sensing, a correlative of Citizen Science, employs low-cost sensors to evidence local environmental issues and empowers citizens to use the data they collect. Whilst motivations for participation can vary, communities affected by pollution frequently have changemaking as their goal. Social innovation is closely aligned with citizen sensing, however the process of co-creating practices and solutions with citizens who wish to shape their world can be highly complex to design. Therefore, our research articulates an action-orientated framework which emerges from a 2-year pan European project by which follow-on communities may replicate sensing initiatives more easily. The authors examine five studies and explore the cross-cutting principles, phases, stakeholders, methods, and challenges which form this framework. The authors argue that whilst data collection and data awareness are crucial to the citizen sensing process, there are precursory and subsequent stages which are necessary to equip citizens to address complex environmental challenges and take action on them. Therefore, this paper focuses on the stages and methods which are distinctive to citizen sensing. It concludes with recommendations for future practice for citizen sensing and citizen science.

Exploring radiation measurement after Fukushima: When media ecology meets citizen science

While various scholars have investigated the role of citizens in generating scientific data after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster under the labels of citizen science and citizen sensing, this essay draws on media ecology and explores its potential theoretical usefulness for enhancing our understanding of post-Fukushima citizen science practices. Taking Marshall McLuhan’s perspective of technology as a medium, this essay creates a theoretical framework for foregrounding the role of a measurement device (of radiation levels, in this case) in extending its user’s body and mind. In doing so, this essay attempts to contribute to the fields of media studies and Science, Technology, and Society (STS).

Citizen Sensing from a Legal Standpoint: Legitimizing the Practice under the Aarhus Framework

‘Citizen sensing’, grassroots-driven environmental monitoring, could revolutionize environmental risk governance and decision-making. Yet, citizen sensing is far from being accepted by governmental authorities. This contribution explores the environmental law doctrine and legislation for a possible legal basis on which the ‘sensing citizens’ could perform their actions. I argue that the practice, by nature, voices the citizen’s claims to have access to (accurate) environmental information. I defend that citizen sensing is a legitimate manifestation of ‘rights in action’ that can enhance the respect of human environmental rights and promote their enforcement. This study demonstrates how, from the Aarhus Convention framework, an obligation for competent authorities to ‘listen’ to the sensing citizens might even be constructed in case of institutional informational gaps and failures.

Using Citizen Sensing to Identify Heat-Exposed Neighbourhoods

Rural areas cool off by night but built-up urban areas lack similar relief and may threaten vulnerable people’s health during heat waves. Temperature varies within a city due to the heterogenous nature of urban environments, but official measurement stations are unable to capture local variations, since they use few measurement stations typically set up outside of urban areas. Meteorological measurements may as such be at odds with citizen sensing, where absolute accuracy is sacrificed in pursuit of increased coverage. In this article, we use geographic information processing methodologies and generate 144 hourly apparent temperature surfaces for Rotterdam during a six-day heat wave that took place in July 2019 in The Netherlands. These surfaces are used to generate a humidex degree hours (HDH) composite map. The HDH metric integrates apparent temperature intensity with duration into one spatially explicit value and is used to identify geographical areas in Rotterdam where citizens may experience adverse health effects of prolonged heat exposure. Combining the HDH map with demographic data allows us to identify the most heat-exposed areas with the largest share of vulnerable population. These neighbourhoods may be the locations most in need of adaptation measures.