Jennifer Gabrys

Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensorbased ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material—political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban ‘citizenship’ to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucaults notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial—material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a ‘citizen’ and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

Arts, sciences and climate change:practices and politics at the threshold

Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called for expanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of cultural and creative responses to environmental change. Yet what new perspectives does the arts–science intersection offer for rethinking climate change? Which historic conjunctions of arts–sciences are most useful to consider in relation to present-day practices, or in what ways do these previous alignments significantly shift in response to climate change? The uncertainty, contingency, and experimentation necessarily characteristic of climate change may generate emergent forms of practice that require new approaches—not just to arts and sciences, but also at the new thresholds, or ‘meetings and mutations’ that these practices cross. Thresholds—narrated here through the figure of ‘zero degrees’—offer a way to bring together sites of encounter, transformations, uncertainties, future scenarios, material conditions and political practices in relation to climate change. Such shifting thresholds and relations lead not to fundamental re-definitions or demarcations of arts and sciences, arguably, but rather to shared encounters with politics. Drawing on philosophies of aesthetics and sciences elaborated by Jacques Rancière and Isabelle Stengers, we point to the ways in which political possibility is entangled with aesthetic-material conditions and practices, and how recognition of these interrelations might enable ‘collective experimentation’ within both creative practices and climate sciences.

Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet

Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth examines how sensor technologies are programming our environments. As this study points out, sensors do not merely record information about an environment. Rather, they generate new environments and environmental relations. At the same time, they give a voice to the entities they monitor: to animals, plants, people, and inanimate objects. This book looks at the ways in which sensors converge with environments to map ecological processes, to track the migration of animals, to check pollutants, to facilitate citizen participation, and to program infrastructure. Through discussing particular instances where sensors are deployed for environmental study and citizen engagement across three areas of environmental sensing, from wild sensing to pollution sensing and urban sensing, Program Earth asks how sensor technologies specifically contribute to new environmental conditions. What are the implications for wiring up environments? How do sensor applications not only program environments, but also program the sorts of citizens and collectives we might become? Program Earth suggests that the sensor-based monitoring of Earth offers the prospect of making new environments not simply as an extension of the human but rather as new “technogeographies” that connect technology, nature, and people.

Sink: the dirt of systems

Sinks are a device within environmental studies that describe spaces and processes that capture and channel wastes. This paper first explores sinks both as a cultural figure of environmental understanding and as an important technoscientific instrument within current attempts to describe the global carbon cycle in relation to climate change. The movement of wastes to and through sinks is often characterized as a metabolic operation, and this metabolic framing forms a key part of this investigation. Drawing on Serress notion of the parasite, the paper considers how waste, noise, and interference may characterize other types of metabolic exchange that allow for a revised approach to sinks. The second section of this paper considers how waste ‘spills’ across environments in space and time. Spills are a way to describe the movement and exchange of wastes that do not conform to a clear trajectory or network, but, rather, express more formless and even disruptive geographies. Three ‘spills’ then structure this examination of the movement and mutation of waste, including the elusive transfer of carbon found within the ‘missing sinks’ in the biosphere, the indistinct exchanges of carbon and other wastes that occur with human and nonhuman bodies, and the uncertain exchanges and accumulations of carbon wastes in the future. In this investigation I argue that sinks point toward the revision of the notion that environments are or should be in metabolic balance, in favor of more complex and hybrid ecologies and exchanges that incorporate the transformative capacities of waste. Concluding with Bennetts discussion of the ‘ecology of matter’, this paper then suggests that the dynamic qualities of waste and matter require renewed attention to environmental exchanges, practices, and imaginings.

A Cosmopolitics of Energy: Diverging Materialities and Hesitating Practices

Numerous proposals, analyses, and strategies now exist for materializing energy in order to influence environmental participation and reduce energy use. This paper asks how specific materialities of energy are articulated across social science and creative practice projects, and how these distinct renderings of materiality perform environmental change. Drawing on work by Stengers, the paper moves to consider the diverging materialities and speculative practices that might emerge through more cosmopolitical approaches to energy. A range of creative practice projects that materialize energy and perform environmental change in different registers is discussed, with attention given to considering how what counts as materiality, participation, and environmental matters of concern shifts within these differently configured engagements. The paper asks how alternative materialities of energy might be articulated that work through experimental registers of environmental practice, and that may not always be clearly directed toward instrumental ends. How might environmental practices attend to the speculative qualities of performativity, which engage not just with energy as actuality but also with energy as potentiality?

Just good enough data: Figuring data citizenships through air pollution sensing and data stories

Citizen sensing, or the use of low-cost and accessible digital technologies to monitor environments, has contributed to new types of environmental data and data practices. Through a discussion of participatory research into air pollution sensing with residents of northeastern Pennsylvania concerned about the effects of hydraulic fracturing, we examine how new technologies for generating environmental data also give rise to new problems for analysing and making sense of citizen-gathered data. After first outlining the citizen data practices we collaboratively developed with residents for monitoring air quality, we then describe the data stories that we created along with citizens as a method and technique for composing data. We further mobilise the concept of ‘just good enough data’ to discuss the ways in which citizen data gives rise to alternative ways of creating, valuing and interpreting datasets. We specifically consider how environmental data raises different concerns and possibilities in relation to Big Data, which can be distinct from security or social media studies. We then suggest ways in which citizen datasets could generate different practices and interpretive insights that go beyond the usual uses of environmental data for regulation, compliance and modelling to generate expanded data citizenships.

Automatic Sensation: Environmental Sensors in the Digital City

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the use of environmental sensors, wireless networks and mobile media as technologies of sensation in the city. While these devices enable a “digital city,” in many respects they appear to be immaterial, operating beyond sense. Further, drawing on two case studies presented by the Digital Cities project in Montreal, the paper considers how applications of environmental sensors and mobile media give rise to new conditions and questions for how we configure sense in the “digital city.” The paper ultimately finds that sensors direct us toward new sites, assemblages and practices of sensation within the urban sensorium.

Practicing, materialising and contesting environmental data:

While there are now an increasing number of studies that critically and rigorously engage with Big Data discourses and practices, these analyses often focus on social media and other forms of online data typically generated about users. This introduction discusses how environmental Big Data is emerging as a parallel area of investigation within studies of Big Data. New practices, technologies, actors and issues are concretising that are distinct and specific to the operations of environmental data. Situating these developments in relation to the seven contributions to this special collection, the introduction outlines significant characteristics of environmental data practices, data materialisations and data contestations. In these contributions, it becomes evident that processes for validating, distributing and acting on environmental data become key sites of materialisation and contestation, where new engagements with environmental politics and citizenship are worked through and realised.

From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution

Citizen sensing, or the practice of monitoring environments through low-cost and do-it-yourself (DIY) digital technologies, is often structured as an individual pursuit. The very term citizen within citizen sensing suggests that the practice of sensing is the terrain of one political subject using a digital device to monitor her or his environment to take individual action. Yet in some circumstances, citizen sensing practices are reworking the sites and distributions of environmental monitoring toward other configurations that are more multiple and collective. What are the qualities and capacities of these collective modes of sensing, and how might they shift the assumed parameters—and effectiveness—of citizen sensing? We engage with Simondon’s writing to consider how a “perceptive problematic” generates collectives for feeling and responding to events (or an “affective problematic”), here through the ongoing event of air pollution. Further drawing on writing from Stengers, we discuss how the “work” of citizen sensing involves much more than developing new technologies, and instead points to the ways in which new practices, subjects, milieus, evidence, and politics are worked through as perceptive and affective commitments to making sense of and addressing the problem of pollution.

Citizen sensing, air pollution and fracking: From ‘caring about your air’ to speculative practices of evidencing harm:

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is an emerging and growing industry that is having considerable effects on environments and health. Yet fracking often lacks environmental regulations that might be understood as governmental forms of care. In some locations in the US, citizens have taken up environmental monitoring as a way to address this perceived absence of care, and to evidence harm in order to argue for new infrastructures of care. This article documents the practices of residents engaged in monitoring air pollution near fracking sites in the US, as well as the participatory and practice-based research undertaken by the Citizen Sense research project to develop monitoring kits for residents to use and test over a period of seven months. Citizen sensing practices for monitoring air pollution can constitute ways of expressing care about environments, communities and individual and public health. Yet practices for documenting and evidencing harm through the ongoing collection of air pollution data are also speculative attempts to make relevant these unrecognised and overlooked considerations of the need for care. Working with the concept of speculation, this article advances alternative notions of evidence, care and policy that attend to citizens’ experiences of living in the gas fields. How do citizen sensing practices work towards alternative ways of evidencing harm? In what ways does monitoring with environmental sensors facilitate this process? And what new speculative practices emerge to challenge the uses of environmental sensors, as well as to expand the types of data gathered, along with their political impact?