founded in 1988 by a group of high school students who organized themselves to raise community awareness about environmental pollution in their Brooklyn neighborhood. The name came from a comic book of the same name, whose characters were crusaders against toxic waste.” The students were from the El Puente Academy high school and the community organization’s program on community health, youth service, and leadership. What began as a science-class project turned into an organization that raised environmental awareness in the community and helped galvanize a community coalition that would be instrumental for taking action against neighborhood environmental hazards. The young people who formed the Toxic Avengers were part of a science class that was doing a unit on understanding the neighborhood environment. The class researched local hazards by gathering readily available information from local, state, and federal environmental agencies on the environmental performance of facilities in the community. The students also searched through newspaper archives to find references to environmental pollution in their neighborhood. They discovered, for example, that the Radiac Corporation—a storage and transfer facility for toxic, flammable, and low-level-radioactive waste located in the neighborhood—was the only facility of its kind in the entire city.
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.