Citizen Sensing, Urban Politics and Practice-Based Research

• In Event: The Ethnographic Effect: Imagining a Next Generation of Methodological Possibilities II

Abstract

Sensors are by now well-established components of urban design. Smart infrastructures are intended to create more efficient and sustainable urban processes. Participation in these sensing infrastructures is often framed as a way for citizens to effect change within their cities. Yet how do citizen monitoring and political action emerge in these contexts? And how could expanded methods for investigating sensors and citizen sensors generate new approaches to urban politics?

Moving beyond narrow modes of citizen-participation-as-data-collection, we explore how practice-based research enables an expanded understanding of how political concerns form and coalesce across human and non-human engagements with urban environments. In this presentation we describe the participatory methodology employed in the “Urban Sensing” strand of our research project, Citizen Sense. This project develops generative experiments with participation through encounters across citizens, low-cost air quality monitors, citizen-generated data, regulatory infrastructures and urban landscapes. We describe how Dustbox air quality monitors were taken up by residents and organizations in Southeast London (UK) in ways that attempted to grapple with the changing urban fabric of the area. As a response to high-density housing development on brownfield sites and tunneling for large-scale smart city infrastructure, we discuss how Dustbox data was formed through different registers and intensities of urban politics. These experimental practices are then “unexpected journeys” for investigating how citizen sensor data is constituted and operationalized in relation to neighbourhood planning, collaborative policy writing, and environmental health.

Authors

• Lara Houston, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London

• Helen Pritchard, Goldsmiths University of London