Citizen Empowerment through Air Quality Monitoring

Nowadays, urban air pollution is one of the greatest environmental and social challenges. However, air quality data are often nor representative nor accessible to citizens. Within this context, digital social innovations (DSI) are emerging to foster profound change in a collaborative manner. This paper investigates the potential of hackAIR as a digital social innovation for citizen environmental sensing in the context of urban air quality. The impact of hackAIR is analysed through the framework of the empowerment theory through the intrapersonal, interactional and behavioural component. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 20 citizens, and through a feedback from after a sensor building workshop with 44 respondents. The empowering processes of hackAIR revealed an impact on the participants’ self-efficacy regarding air quality monitoring (interpersonal); problem awareness, knowledge as well as on skills regarding the monitoring, analysis and finding of information sources (interactional); community participation, advocacy behaviour and to some extent on protective behaviour (behavioural). However, participants perceived low perceived control over the general air quality issue (interactional), experienced a low community involvement and only performed some preventive behaviours (behavioural). Overall, DSI in the form of participatory sensing proved to be an effective empowering process, giving the tools to citizens to better perceive, understand and act regarding air pollution.

ISBN:9788409147557

Publication year:2019

Keywords:air quality, citizen science

Accessibility:Open