Citizen as Sensors' Commitment in Urban Public Action: Case Study on Urban Air Pollution

Literature Review

Rick Bonney (Bonney 1995) defined citizen sciences as scientific methods that involve non-scientists. Another definition of citizen sciences was given by Alan Irwin (Irwin 1995) and refers to the democratisation of science and citizens’ relations with science governance. In both cases, the public participates in a collective action including field observation, inventory, and metrology that describe the urban environment and spur discussions. With the rise of low-cost air pollution sensors (Kumar et al. 2015), and the citizen as a sensor utopia – in other words, the possibility to create a network of a six billion humans using ICTs to measure and to share situated knowledge with the aim to create a common good (Goodchild 2007) – citizen metrology becomes a suitable way of action for cities.

Environmental metrology aims to quantify chemical components, species, among other attributes of the environment to describe and study phenomena. Metrologies are structured by methods and protocols recognized by scientific communities. Metrology is sometimes used by citizens to produce street science in local communities when environmental controversies emerge (Corbun 2005). Those citizen metrology projects can be managed by scientist-activists (Topçu 2008).