9. Sensing the air and experimenting with environmental citizenship

Abstract

This chapter analyzes community-led citizen sensing projects as a new form of environmental citizenship. Sensing and monitoring air quality can be playful forms of civic engagement with public issues. In these site-specific citizen sensing projects, creative means are being used to engage citizens in measuring air pollution with the aid of technology. The chapter argues that such experimental initiatives should be approached as material processes in which new forms of data retrieval and democratic engagement are developed that can potentially give rise to new and more just power relations in knowledge production.