A research initiative directly focused on the potential for emerging ubiquitous urban and personal mobile technologies to enable citizen action by allowing open measuring, sharing, and remixing of elements of urban living marked by, requiring, or involving participation, especially affording the opportunity for individual citizen participation, sharing, and voice. Participatory urbanism promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self-reflexivity. One such example of Participatory Urbanism is the use of mobile phones to be transformed into environmental sensing platforms that support community action to effect positive societal change.
Published in Chapter:
Citizen Science: Enabling Participatory Urbanism
Eric Paulos (Intel Research Berkeley, USA), RJ Honicky (University of California, Berkeley, USA), and Ben Hooker (Intel Research Berkeley, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-152-0.ch028
Abstract
In this chapter, we present an important new shift in mobile phone usage—from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument.” We explore how these new “personal instruments” enable an entirely novel and empowering genre of mobile computing usage called citizen science. We investigate how such citizen science can be used collectively across neighborhoods and communities to enable individuals to become active participants and stakeholders as they publicly collect, share, and remix measurements of their city that matter most to them. We further demonstrate the impact of this new participatory urbanism by detailing its usage within the scope of environmental awareness. Inspired by a series of field studies, user driven environmental measurements, and interviews, we present the design of a working hardware system that integrates air quality sensing into an existing mobile phone and exposes the citizen authored measurements to the community—empowering people to become true change agents.