CITI-SENSE Edinburgh -The empowerment potential of participatory tools for environmental monitoring of air quality

摘要

CITI-SENSE is a Collaborative Project partly funded by the EU FP7-ENV-2012 under grant agreement no 308524. The project involves nine cities across Europe which are defining and implementing the concept of a Citizens' Observatory. The aim of the project is to collect, collate and convey a multitude of environmental health information with participatory practices. This poster reports on the feedback from Edinburgh where people evaluated the empowerment potential of a variety of tools regarding urban air quality. Empowerment meaning enhancing an individual's or group's capacity to make effective choices, effective in the sense of enabling them to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. A web portal that hosts information on all tools developed and applied within the frame of the project has been created and contains a Citizens' Observatory toolbox (http://co.citi-sense.eu/). In Edinburgh three tools have been applied and evaluated with members of the general public in combination, these being the: 1. The Little Environment Observatory (LEO) - a personal sensor that measures NO, NO2 and 03 as well as temperature and relative humidity. The LEOs work in combination with an app and transmits data to a visualization webpage (item 3). Participants carried the LEOs with them for a week collecting air quality data as well as gaining user experience. 2. The CityAir app - this gives citizens the opportunity to log their perception of air quality at any given point in time and space using a colorimetric indicator. Additional comments can be left every time a new perception is logged. Participants were asked to log their perception regularly during the 1 week trial with the LEOs. 3. The visualization web page - designed to allow citizens to view data from the LEOs as well as from the CityAir app. In addition it allows users to access data from other CITI-SENSE tools should they wish to do so. Upon participation citizens asked to provide feedback on the usability and empowerment potential of the tools via questionnaire and a short interview. User evaluation of the outlined tools will take place during April - May 2016, with the analysis of the collected information following thereafter. Analysis will be based on empowerment potential guidelines developed by the project team aiming at usefulness of the tools, opportunities and barriers for improving air quality based on the tools. Our poster will present the findings of the evaluation process that took place with the participating Edinburgh citizens.