If we’re so smart, then why aren’t we healthier?
Moving beyond monitoring air pollution to improving air quality
(by Gyorgyi Galik, with contributions from Jonathan Broderick)
This blog post and my work critically analyse the reductionist, technological approaches of smart cities aimed at tackling air pollution and mitigating the effects of climate change. It offers evidence-based practical alternatives to these approaches and suggests how future work in this field might expand this narrow design space.
Severe health impacts
With more people living in cities than ever before, urban air quality has become a serious concern. Already in 2016, the WHO identified “air pollution [as] the largest single environmental health risk and a leading cause of disease and death affecting the cardiovascular and respiratory systems globally”. Pollution is severely damaging to the health of children.
Exposure to vehicular air pollution during pregnancy, infancy or childhood has been associated with delays in cognitive development [1] [2] [3]. And numerous studies [4] [5] [6] suggest that air pollution has adverse effects on lung function and development. While shortening their life-expectancies, this exposure makes these children more likely to suffer from increased rates of respiratory illnesses, such as asthma and bronchitis. It is important to note that this is an issue of not only health and wellbeing but also inequality; the most polluted urban areas tend to also be the areas with the lowest property values.
Fran Tonkiss explains in her talk Urban Inequality in the C21st’ [7] that “one of the crudest inequities in contemporary cities is between those whose lifestyles produce environmental harms and those whose livelihoods and living situations make them most vulnerable to these harms.” She talks about the deeply uneven and unjust geographies of environmental risk. As she puts it:
Strategies for more environmentally sustainable cities must go beyond issues of design and technology to address toxic environmental inequalities. More sustainable urban futures that don’t simply depend on finding better technical solutions, but on a more serious commitment on environmental equity in cities and elsewhere.
Given this worrying information, what can be done?
Don’t we know enough about air pollution to do something about it?
Despite all the evidence and positive examples from around the world of how municipalities and national governments effectively improved air quality and reduced environmental pollution — the argument that we don’t know enough about air pollution (e.g. we need more sensors and accurate data) comes up in most discussions and conferences, especially those focused on smart cities. Unsurprisingly, those advocating this viewpoint are often the same people who either sell sensor networks or have been tasked with managing air quality.
Professor William Gauderman — from the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California — visited the UK in 2017 to present the ways in which, for example, Southern California improved air quality between 1992 and 2014. During his talk, he shared all the key findings and explain some of the major regulatory policies that contributed to Southern California’s successful pollution reduction programme.
In the very same week that I met Professor Gauderman, I attended another air quality conference in London, where one of the keynote speakers made the following remarks:
I think it’s hard to come up with big successful policies [to improve air quality] that work because the evidence base here is very thin. I suspect that this scarcity is due to two factors: first, a lack of big interventions to tackle the problem, and second, the difficulties of objectively assessing intervention outcomes.
Contrary to these remarks, there are in fact numerous examples of forward-thinking policies and interventions (detailed in my blogpost How to improve air quality in cities?) that had a positive, long-term impact on air quality.
Beyond collecting more evidence, it’s crucial to understand how politics, economic interests and public narratives determine how political leaders, cities and citizens respond to pollution (that will be discussed in the following blog posts).
Moving beyond instrumenting the city
Instrumenting the city has become a popular way for local governments to understand and measure environmental health risks, such as noise, heat and air pollution. In cities around the world, air quality sensor networks have been deployed on the basis that better, more granular data will help inform policy-making and legislation aimed at improving air pollution.
In parallel to government and intergovernmental initiatives, the citizen-sensing movement [8] and private sensor-vendors specialising in smart cities have been developing sensing applications of their own. While the latter are mostly commercially driven, the former aim to democratise the collection of environmental data and thereby engage citizens in environmental health issues directly.
Sensing is a critical step towards improving pollution or assessing environmental risk. Sensing can provide, for example, the evidence for communities affected by pollution to challenge the authority of governments and industries that produce false or misleading information.
There are numerous examples of sensing being used in support of community-led initiatives examples for change, not only on air quality sensors but on sustained engagement with air and other environmental pollution. For example, residents in Cuddalore District of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, are forming ‘Bucket Brigades’ to measure their community’s air quality and fight for healthier environments against the impacts of the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamilnadu Ltd (SIPCOT). SIPCOT was established in 1971 to develop industrial growth in Tamilnadu [9]. A new partnership has helped people in six villages get to the root of their severe health problems. As Justin Kushik and Kielly Dunn (2004) explain “villagers have teamed up with the Other Media, consumer group FEDCOT and Global Community Monitor (GCM) to begin gathering evidence and building a case to force companies to comply with pollution laws” [10]. Communities in India and across the U.S. use the Bucket to collect and test air samples and use the data to advocate for stricter environmental regulations [11].
Air quality data and other environmental data can indeed allow cities and citizens to evaluate the efficacy of their interventions and help regulators enforce current legislation, but sensing and citizen engagement alone are not enough when it comes to addressing the complexity and sources of pollution.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve been studying a variety of public and private air sensing infrastructures and applications. To name but a few of the hundreds of applications currently available on the market, this included CleanSpace, Smart Citizen Kit, and the Air Quality Egg. In many cases, these interventions do not necessarily help people to better understand the complexity of the context in which the air pollution data is gathered. Many also simplify how pollution is produced and downplayed in different cultural and political contexts. Few take into consideration how politics, economic interests and public narratives can determine how cities and citizens respond to pollution (these will be discussed in my blogpost The reasons why we don’t see pollution).
Jennifer Gabrys [12] explains that citizen sensing research and practice might expand from their usual framing as sensing technologies toward political action to encompass a more inventive and open set of engagements. Also, describing the role of digital media, she argues that technologies — that are always in the making, changing through practice — might be disrupted through programs of use that become sites of active cultural and political engagement. As she puts it:
New insights may emerge in practice by testing the very articulations of ‘citizenship’ that [these] technologies may facilitate.
What happens with the data?
We will go down as the first species who was monitoring his own extinction…
— Caroline Lucas, MP, co-leader, UK Green Party
Though low-cost sensors can be useful for raising awareness about air pollution, it’s important to emphasise and understand the steps needed to move from ‘monitoring air pollution’ to ‘improving air quality’. Moreover, it would be important to critically observe the common assumptions embedded into these technologies that e.g. raising awareness, making the invisible visible and nudging people will ultimately lead to sustained civic and political action. These claims can have long-term implications for both environmental and human health.
Before deploying sensor networks, cities, technology vendors, and activists should be aware of how costly and time-consuming it can be to maintain these networks — such as data analytics, calibration, and battery life. But more importantly, I argue that data should be produced in the service of a hypothesis or decision and not just for the sake of data spectatorship. If data is being produced in order to decide between two courses of action, then evaluation can be undertaken to decide which action was more impactful.
After several years of working with organisations that were trying to solve air pollution using smart cities interventions that had little or no effect on air quality, I became skeptical of this approach. All too often these interventions simply confirmed the fact that the air is polluted — while citizens and local authorities became increasingly disillusioned by the fact that their air remained just as polluted as ever.
As the following series of posts on how to improve air quality in cities will reveal, there are numerous interventions that could make cities more liveable and healthier. And cities and regions — including Copenhagen, London, and Southern California, to name but a few — have already put some of these interventions into practice.
(I really appreciate/welcome any comments and ideas. Please send your thoughts to gyorgyigalik.medium@gmail.com)
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
References:
[1] Woodward, N., Finch, C. E., & Morgan, T. E. (2015). Traffic-related air pollution and brain development. AIMS Environmental Science, 2(2), 353–373. http://doi.org/10.3934/environsci.2015.2.353
[2] Sunyer J, Esnaola M, Alvarez-Pedrerol M, Forns J, Rivas I, et al. (2015) Association between Traffic-Related Air Pollution in Schools and Cognitive Development in Primary School Children: A Prospective Cohort Study. PLOS Medicine 12(3): e1001792. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001792, Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273153132_Association_between_Traffic-Related_Air_Pollution_in_Schools_and_Cognitive_Development_in_Primary_School_Children_A_Prospective_Cohort_Study
[3] Pujol, J. et al. (2016). Traffic pollution exposure is associated with altered brain connectivity in school children. NeuroImage. Volume 129, 1 April 2016, Pages 175–184. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811916000513?via%3Dihub
[4] Gauderman, W.J., Avol. E., Gilliland, F. et al. (2004) The Effect of Air Pollution on Lung Development from 10 to 18 Years of Age. The New England Journal of Medicine. Massachusetts Medical Society. 9 September 2004. Available at: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa040610
[5] Eminton, S. (2012) “Lungs of London schoolchildren “damaged by poor air quality”. Available at: https://www.airqualitynews.com/2012/07/20/lungs-of-london-schoolchildren-damaged-by-poor-air-quality/
[6] Marino, E., Caruso, M., Campagna, D., & Polosa, R. (2015). Impact of air quality on lung health: myth or reality? Therapeutic Advances in Chronic Disease, 6(5), 286–298. http://doi.org/10.1177/2040622315587256
[7] Tonkiss, F. Divided Cities: urban inequalities in the 21st century. LSE 2015. ~50mins. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4iXe5l4whY
[8] Gabrys, J. (2016) “Citizen Sensing: Recasting Ontologies through Proliferating Digital Practices.” Cultural Anthropology (Theorizing the Contemporary). Available at: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/823-citizen-sensing-recastingdigital-ontologies-through-proliferating-practices
[9] SIPCOT website. Available at: https://www.sipcot.com/
[10] Kushik, J. & Dunn, K. (2004) India: Bucket Brigades Monitor Air Pollution Inexpensively. Global Greengrants Fund. Published September 20, 2004. Available at: https://www.greengrants.org/2004/09/20/india-bucket-brigades-monitor-air-pollution-inexpensively/
[11] Grassroots Change: A Grassroots Movement for Clean Air: Bucket Brigades. Published: 13 May 2014. Available at: https://grassrootschange.net/2014/05/a-grassroots-movement-for-clean-air-bucket-brigades/
[12] Gabrys, J. (2018) “Environmental Sensing and ‘Media’ as Practice in the Making.” In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York: Routledge, 2018), 503–510. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/19517/1/Gabrys_DHCompanion_2018.pdf
