Participatory Urbanism

Participatory Urbanism

Urban Atmospheres' Participatory Urbanism presents an important new shift in mobile device usage - from communication tool to “networked mobile personal measurement instrument”. We explore how these new “instruments” enable entirely new participatory urban lifestyles and create novel mobile device usage models.

In the spirit of Urban Computing, Participatory Urbanism is the open authoring, sharing, and remixing of new or existing urban technologies marked by, requiring, or involving participation, especially affording the opportunity for individual citizen participation, sharing, and voice. Participatory Urbanism builds upon a large body of related projects where citizens act as agents of change. There is a long history of such movements from grassroot neighborhood watch campaigns to political revolutions. It is not a disconnected personal phone application, a domestic networked appliance, a mobile route planning application, an office scheduling tool, or a social networking service. Participatory Urbanism promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self reflexivity. Examples of Participatory Urbanism include but are not limited to: providing mobile device centered hardware toolkits for non-experts to become authors of new everyday urban objects, generating individual and collective needs based dialogue tools around the desired usage of urban green spaces, or empowering citizens to collect and share air quality data measured with sensor enabled mobile devices.

Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools . They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor. We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. Our desire is to provide our mobile devices with new “super-senses” and abilities by enabling a wide range of physical sensors to be easily attached and used by anyone, especially non-experts.

We argue there are two indisputable facts about our future mobile devices: (1) that they will be equipped with more sensing and processing capabilities and (2) that they will also be driven by an architecture of participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to their tools and applications as they use them.
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Personal, Mobile Air Quality Measurments
an example of Participatory Urbanism

Millions of us carry a mobile device such as a mobile phone with us everyday. For all of its computational power and sophistication it provides us very little insight into the actual conditions of the terrain we traverse with it. In fact the only real-time environmental data it renders is a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum with a tiny readout of cell tower signal strength using a series of bars
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The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million deaths each year can be attributed to air pollution - that’s more deaths than those resulting from automobile accidents. Presently, citizens must defer to a small handful of civic government installed environmental monitoring stations that use extrapolation to derive a single air quality measurement for an entire metropolitan region. This sparse sensing strategy does little to capture the dynamic variability arising from daily automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and smaller industries. Are we to believe that the park, subway exit, underground parking lot, building atrium, bus stop, and roadway median are all equivalent environmental places?




We collected two weeks of environmental data from taxicabs moving across the city of Accra, Ghana that illustrates the wide air quality fluctuations. The taxi mounted tube air sampler with carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide sensors exposed and packaged are shown below. Also, several individuals collected data throughout the day using a body worn setup containing similar air quality sensors and GPS unit also shown below.