Abstract
Often, health is seen to be a matter of attending to individuals and their behaviour, or of studying populations in order to manage disease. However, pollution is a problem of the health of environments, as much as it is a problem of the health of bodies. To understand health and pollution, it is necessary to examine energy-intensive infrastructures and developed environments that produce air pollutants and impair ecosystems. In other words, air pollution requires approaches to health that are planetary in scope and that account for the socio-environmental processes and relations that make health possible. Planetary health is often approached as a broad analysis of earth systems. However, diverse and situated environmental practices also contribute to the formation of planetary health. This article asks how citizen-sensing practices tune into the problem of air pollution in Southeast London, and in so doing differently configure pollution and planetary health. While many sensing technologies promise to make citizens into more capable political actors through the collection of data, this research investigates how communities use sensors in distinct ways to support, activate or extend community-led projects in urban environments. Rather than citizen-sensing practices contributing to improved air quality through the abstract circulation of data, we found that environmental monitoring became enmeshed in ongoing and broader struggles to improve the health of urban environments. These practices not only challenge the official scripts of sensing devices, they also remake the usual ways of demarcating health in relation to air pollution by shifting away from individual behaviour and toward collective environmental actions. This article then asks how community proposals for urban design and action conjoin with citizen-sensing practices to generate strategies for reworking and reconstituting health toward more planetary compositions.
Highlights
Air pollution has become evident as a planetary problem through a pervasive but differential array of health effects
Rather than citizen-sensing practices contributing to improved air quality through the abstract circulation of data, we found that environmental monitoring became enmeshed in ongoing and broader struggles to improve the health of urban environments
These practices challenge the official scripts of sensing devices, they remake the usual ways of demarcating health in relation to air pollution
Summary
I address these questions by drawing on science and technology studies, environmental justice and postcolonial theory, and planetary health literature to first establish how citizen monitoring of pollution potentially contributes to the democratization of environmental evidence and of environmental action Within this context, I analyse how citizen sensing reworks practices of environmental observation, while differently constituting health and pollution. Rather than citizen-sensing practices contributing to improved air quality through the abstract circulation of data, we found that environmental monitoring became enmeshed in ongoing and broader struggles to improve the health of urban environments These practices challenge the official scripts of sensing devices, they remake the usual ways of demarcating health in relation to air pollution. It is these processes of directly and indirectly configuring, reworking and experimenting with health as a collective and planetary proposition that this article investigates from the perspective of one participatory air-quality-monitoring study in London
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