Rights, Citizens, and Worlds in the Making

Rights often turn up in relation to digital and social-media technologies as the right to privacy, the right to be forgotten, the right to data protection, and the right to open data. However, this discussion proposes another way of thinking about how rights to breathable worlds, along with multiple other rights, materialize through citizen-data practices. The use of environmental-monitoring technologies can activate different rights in the making. This process of remaking and creating rights changes the relation and constitution of the citizen in data citizen. Data can become a way to track, document and concretize lived urban experiences. Rights can also encompass relations that signal distinct ways of being in and for worlds. Such an approach expands rights beyond a discursive claim,25 to constitute rights as spatial-material practices and relations that are formative in making and sustaining worlds. The right to relations, the right to collective life, and even the right to responsibility might materialize in these recast ways of forming rights.26 The power relations that inform the becoming of citizens are not just exchanges with those who would govern.27 They are also shaped through exchanges with more-than-human entities and environments, where power is situated, lived, and potentially transformed.28

If rights can be characterized as more than discursive claims, then they might be differently approached as relations, dispositions, orientations, infrastructures, collective feelings, atmospheres, and distributed practices that encompass more than an individual rights-bearing citizen. Here, political subjects form through ways of tuning in to and activating environments and environmental problems. These are citizens of worlds. Citizens could form through the conjoining of multiple entities that make possible the conditions of political subjects, as in the case of citizen-sensors (where sensors could be technical or organismal in form, as discussed in the next chapter). The citizen-subject materializes through relations with worlds: this is a condition of sense-ability and breathability. Data citizens not only express a right to data, but also a right to worlds. Different possibilities for being and becoming citizens of worlds are constituted through these exchanges with worlds. To be and become citizens of worlds requires the development of practices and relations that are in constructive and formative exchange with those worlds.

Citizens, rights, and worlds are all together in the making. Practices that express a right to make breathable worlds remake environments and their inhabitants. If data practices contribute to the formation of citizens as political subjects, then they are also fused with the articulation of rights and worlds in the making. This is one way of articulating what Étienne Balibar has referred to as the “continued invention of democracy” that unfolds through struggle and the pursuit of justice.29 Such invention necessarily extends to citizens and worlds in the making. Sensor-based data practices constitute and activate data citizens not just through engagement with data and its devices, but also through the struggles that data supports and mobilizes, along with the associated social-political milieus and relations that are organized, sustained, and transformed.

Evidentiary practices differently create and operationalize citizenship not only as an articulation of pre-existing rights to be upheld but also as the ongoing formation of social, political, and environmental struggles. The pull toward rights not yet realized can shift the usual way of designating and engaging with problems. Rather than operating as a guarantee of an abstract and stable condition of citizenship, citizen data that documents air pollution makes evident how rights materialize as prospective practices, or as sought-after relations.30 The right to clean air indicates how to work toward transformed and more equitable collective atmospheres as worlds in the making, as well as how to become citizens of worlds.31 Citizens of worlds is a concept that signals these prospective practices of political engagement, where the formation and exchanges of subjects and worlds is a central part of what constitutes the sense-ability and breathability of socio-political life.32

The Right-To as How-To

The right-to, then, gives rise to multiple practices of the how-to. As discussed throughout this study, “how to” consists not simply of following instructions, but involves developing practices that engage with the multiple struggles, techniques, and strategies that unfold through working with data and attempting to sustain, create, and transform urban worlds. The right to proposes how to, including how to be in exchange, how to generate environmental actions, and how to sustain political engagements. In this way, the “imperative” mood of the how-to invokes collective responsibility, rather than a command for how to undertake such projects. The right to is a form of how to that works toward more democratic conditions. Through the process of pursuing the right to as a way of generating practices of how to, distinct modes of citizens and citizenship form.

Within this context, sensor-based data practices can propose rights that become instruments for making more breathable worlds. Citizen data can generate open-air instrumentalisms, where rights are claimed, instantiated, circumvented, and reworked as part of the conditions of more livable and just environments. Such reworkings take place through practices that generate different forms of data, that implement or challenge the observational techniques and infrastructures of experts, and that make alternative proposals for urban environments. The right to data and the right to breathable worlds contribute to tools and toolkits that seek to make openings, lead struggles, and work through practical situations in and through which urban projects form.

Rights are, then, another sort of instrument that contributes to the open-air instrumentalism of this shape-shifting toolkit. Yet while the right to data can co-constitute the right to make breathable worlds, such rights can also be difficult to realize for those who are often pushed to the edges of urban life. In the context of citizen-sensing practices, the right to data and the right to breathable worlds are not established political or legal conditions that would serve as simple levers for fixing polluted environments. Such rights indicate, but do not guarantee, additional ways of working toward more livable environments. Instead, they are part of a broader open-air toolkit that seeks out strategies for attempting to cultivate more breathable worlds.

The right to breathable worlds raises the question of praxis, and of how to engage in different configurations of theory and action. Citizenship is a sited, collective, and relational practice that activates environments in different ways. “Citizenship is the practical site of a theoretical existence” as Lauren Berlant notes.33 The practical sites of citizenship involve the active forming, testing, challenging, undoing, and remaking of political engagements and political subjects. This research on citizen sensing forms as a collective inquiry into the conditions of practical engagement that materialize along with experiments in different urban inhabitations.

These modes of practice further demonstrate commitments to struggle for worlds that might be more livable, but they are unevenly available and suggest that failure is likely. Failure, however, is not the flip-side of success, but rather is a recognition of the pitfalls in praxis, where struggle can encounter the “impasses of the political.”34 The reinvention of citizenship, rights, communities, and the worlds that are made and sustained through political relations can, in these moments of impasse, begin to appear more viable. As Berlant writes, “It may be a relation of cruel optimism, when, despite an awareness that the normative political sphere appears as a shrunken, broken, or distant place of activity among elites, members of the body politic return periodically to its recommitment ceremony and scenes.” Such recommitment can involve paying attention to how political formations hold together, how they fall apart, and how they might be remade toward a “more livable and intimate sociality.”35 Rather than bundling rights into a practice available to a universal if diverse grouping of citizens, such an approach might instead tune in to the plurality of political subjects and the struggles they encounter when attempting to invent, articulate, materialize, or transform rights. In this way, struggle becomes the basis for realizing even more—and expanded—modes of citizenship.36

The open-air aspect of this investigation necessarily involves questioning rights-as-instruments in order to consider how different approaches to breathable worlds materialize or are thwarted. Among the various rights that might be claimed through the practices of data citizens, there are as many ways in which rights do not generate more democratic environmental engagements. In relation to the citizen sensing of air quality in Southeast London, I consider how these practices do not so readily realize the rights that they pursue. However, they do potentially reinvent rights and modes of citizenship through alternative political engagements. Such practices are often less utopian or triumphant. They turn up at the frayed edges of citizenships that are denied or never realized, often because of inequalities that include but are not limited to conditions of gender, race, or economic status.37

Data citizens might in this way become less oriented toward the overt ambitions of rights, and instead more engaged with finding provisional techniques for staving off and surviving dispossession, pollution, and injustice that often accompany increasing urbanization. A right to make breathable worlds, and the right to data, offer powers of engagement and transformation that can seem out of reach for many urban dwellers. Such rights in the making could promise democratic participation that is difficult if not impossible to realize.

Citizen data can at once displace and reinvent rights, especially as they fail to address environmental problems. Rather than claiming rights, citizens might instead mobilize data as a persuasive tool for making arguments in support of urban life. When, for instance, an appeal to the right to housing seems too complex or politically impossible to undertake, urban inhabitants might instead demonstrate how new construction is not affordable to local residents. Data-based observations and arguments about unlivable urban conditions become a stopgap measure to sustain urban ways of life that are continually under threat, but for which rights are often not enforceable or do not exist. Some researchers suggest that rights are a way to guarantee environmental protection in a way that citizen data cannot, since citizen data can be easily challenged as inexpert and imperfect.38 However, environmental rights are often difficult to enforce and uphold even when supported by the most “expert” forms of evidence. Indeed, the perceived ineffectiveness and unevenness of rights could in fact mobilize the collection of data. In other words, if rights were effective, then people would not necessarily be so inclined to undertake environmental monitoring, since presumably states and other institutions would perform these functions in order to uphold environmental rights. While an abstract designation of rights might promise an ideal condition, it is often through more contingent practices such as citizen data that rights differently mobilize as subjects and worlds in the making.

Data citizens might be most likely to materialize in situations when the right to clean air becomes difficult to sustain, and where rights fail to support struggles for more breathable worlds. People who may not feel that rights are a clear point of political attachment create evidentiary practices to challenge the dispossession, environmental damage, and injustice of neoliberal urbanization. Citizen data could, in this sense, be a practice that manifests where rights break down or are not yet established.

Data for Black Lives is an example of such a movement that involves developing alternative data collection and analysis techniques to create new narratives about Black people’s lives, while also demonstrating how systemic racism attempts to maintain their inequality.39 As these practices demonstrate, rights are not always self evident, since there are many rights that Black people have but that are often not protected or observed. There are many data-based arguments that might be made that do not have a clear reference to rights. Instead of data configured in support of “universal” rights, data could instead be mobilized to support struggles for everyday survival and dignity in the absence or partial enactment of rights. This is what D4BL Founder and Executive Director Yeshimabeit Milner refers to, in the spirit of W.E. Dubois, as a way to rework data practices away from the destructive uses to which they have been put to reinforce and propagate racism. By creating new data practices, including analysis and visualization, Milner suggests that other possible ways of evidencing Black people’s lives might be sparked.40 These practices of computing otherwise could activate protest, accountability, and collective action, while forming different narratives and rights.41

By documenting air pollution, people come up against the inertia and failures of politics. In multiple and diverse struggles to engage in urban democratic processes, the right to data becomes one way to express a right to breathable worlds. Yet these pursuits can also be derailed, whether through sclerotic urban governance structures, rigid formations of expertise, or exclusionary processes for contributing to urban development. Such data practices can then constitute and propose ways of being data citizens. By undertaking environmental monitoring, citizens mobilize and propose rights to data, to the air, to breathable worlds, and to political life. These practices observe, document, and remake urban life. They propose conditions for being and becoming citizens of worlds. As propositions, they unfold as open-air instrumentalisms and how-to practices. In this way, such practices are guides for working toward more breathable worlds that have been tested, implemented, and that are still in the making. In the next section, I discuss how the Citizen Sense research group worked with communities in Southeast London to sense the air, and to undertake practices for pursuing the right to breathable worlds.

How to Mobilize Citizen-Sensing Infrastructures

Along with learning more about community concerns and campaigns in the area, we worked with residents to develop a toolkit that could grow into a citizen-sensing infrastructure for monitoring air quality.52 Our collaboration with community groups, residents, and workers involved learning more about their diverse data practices, whether in the form of environmental monitoring or analyzing government datasets, while also engaging in meetings, workshops, walks, and site visits to explore the particular uses of citizen-sensing technologies in this part of Southeast London. Far from acting as experts with a singular way of accounting for urban environments, we contributed as co-researchers to data practices that joined up with existing community initiatives.53 We were, in the process, also becoming data citizens as we collaborated with inhabitants and learned more about their concerns for and ways of documenting the area.

For this second phase of research, we were in part drawing on our previous work on sensors and air quality developed in relation to fracking in rural America described in Chapter Two. Yet we were also responding to the area by developing sensors specific to this urban location. Rather than use an off-the-shelf device such as the Speck, we built a new prototype device, the “Dustbox,” which monitored particulate matter 2.5. As previously discussed, PM_2.5 is a particularly hazardous air pollutant made up of a range of different materials that can lead to cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological diseases, among other conditions that are in the process of being studied and documented.54 However, there was a relative absence of regulatory infrastructure for monitoring particulate matter in Deptford and New Cross, and so the development of a citizen-sensing network offered the possibility to better understand concentrations and potential sources of this pollutant.

We created the Dustboxes based on the form of pollen and contaminated soil particles when magnified under an electron microscope. Fabricated through a 3D-printing process and cast in black ceramic, these small plug-and-play monitors used the widely available Shinyei PPD42NJ particle sensor unit, which was installed in numerous low-cost and DIY monitors in circulation at the time. The Shinyei particle sensor applies heat and an infrared light-scattering technique to circulate and sense particles with a diameter of 1 μm or larger.55 A receptor receives the scattered light from the particles to measure the relative opacity of air entering the sensor chamber, which is transformed into a pulse signal that can be further converted into particle concentration. The Dustbox monitor also included a custom-printed circuit board (PCB), Electric Imp Wi-Fi module, and fan for circulating air. We developed the Dustbox as an affective and tactile device that would resonate with the often-gritty environmental conditions of this area in Southeast London, while also proliferating as an engaging citizen-sensing infrastructure.

Along with investigating the possible citizenships that might be activated or mobilized through setting up a network of Dustbox particle sensors, we were interested to understand how the Dustbox could operate in an urban setting where there was a well-known problem with air quality, but not necessarily a single emissions source that could be readily identified and addressed. Yet air pollution was just one among many urban problems that people sought to address. In contrast to visions of the smart city that imagine the urban setting as a blank canvas for implementing digital designs and wiring up citizens, these were spaces where citizen sensing and sensors operate among an already sedimented and established set of processes and concerns. Our project sought to investigate how sensors and data practices could establish the relative intensity of pollution in the area, while proposing different ways of activating rights and citizenships in relation to ongoing urban struggles.

As part of the collaborative development of the Dustbox as a citizen-run air-quality monitoring infrastructure, we worked with a wide array of collaborators (in addition to community members), including atmospheric scientists, so that we could calibrate the Dustbox in relation to the “official” air-quality network in London. This process involved co-locating the Dustbox with regulatory-standard instruments at the Marylebone Observatory run by the London Air Quality Network (LAQN) and the UK Government’s Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).56 We compared the relative particulate-matter measurements across Dustboxes, as well as comparing levels with measurements from regulatory devices. This co-location and calibration process allowed us to make a notional conversion of raw particle counts (as a measure of voltage) into micrograms per cubic meter, a unit of measurement that would allow participants to make indicative comparisons between the Dustbox and the official monitoring infrastructure.57 While citizen data express multiple registers of urban experience, the calibration techniques also created one register for comparing data across different monitoring sites and instruments.

As the Dustboxes were assembled into provisionally workable sensors, we built on methods developed through our fracking-based research to organize a public workshop and walk in late October 2016. The workshop brought together residents, community groups, health researchers, and an assembly member of the Greater London Authority (GLA) to discuss air quality in relation to the changing urban environments of Southeast London. During the workshop, we described the Dustbox and related tools for analyzing data, discussed previous monitoring efforts in the area, and identified additional areas to monitor with the device based on community knowledge of the area. Participants mapped locations they intended to monitor as they noted likely pollution hotspots and sites of changing land use. We also considered how different observations of air quality might be recorded, since sensors could provide a more real-time and numerical way of tuning into air quality, while recorded observations of sound, smell, construction activity, traffic, and other urban events could provide parallel ways to configure data as evidence. We provided a Dustbox Logbook where such observations could be noted, which as parallel forms of data would later inform the analysis of citizen data and composition of data stories.

During this preliminary workshop, we also set out on a walk to look at key sites of construction activity, busy roadways with clogged traffic, and industrial sites, so that we could discuss where to monitor and how to study changing land uses.58 As part of the walk, we looked at existing sensors and monitoring infrastructure installed in the area, including air quality and noise monitoring underway as part of the Thames Tideway “super sewer” development in Deptford. We discussed whether we could access the data from these monitoring sites, since the Thames Tideway data was not readily accessible to the public, even though this was a national infrastructure project. While environmental monitoring was taking place in multiple forms in this neighborhood, the data was rarely open to wider use, which meant that from small developments to large infrastructure projects that span London it was difficult to gauge whether local pollution events might be occurring. Participants considered how they might request data at meetings with the Tideway organization. They also assessed which other air-quality data might be available nearby, since at the time the Borough of Lewisham had just three air-quality monitors installed over a large area, which would provide only a rough estimate of air pollution at the actual sites of major construction projects.59

After walking around these development sites, we then moved to a local pub to distribute Dustboxes and talk through how to use the devices and where residents might monitor. Many participants borrowed Dustboxes during this workshop event, while others checked monitors out of the local library, or contacted us directly to pick up a monitor. The Dustbox Logbook included setup instructions so that participants could install the devices themselves. Ordinarily, however, we also arranged visits to monitoring sites to help participants install and troubleshoot their devices.

The Dustbox infrastructure grew into a changeable and fluctuating infrastructure. As new people began monitoring, others paused or stopped monitoring. We set up a citizen-sensing network that included up to 30 Dustbox sensors monitoring PM_2.5. However, the number of Dustboxes running varied throughout the monitoring period spanning nearly ten months from December 2016 to September 2017, with consistent monitoring taking place at eighteen locations over a seven-month period. We made numerous visits to monitoring sites to install devices, connect them to Wi-Fi networks, find suitable outdoor space for monitoring urban air, and make adjustments along the way as devices went offline or required repairs.60

The loaning of devices was just the beginning of a more extensive process of setting up Dustboxes, since each monitoring spot had its unique requirements and idiosyncrasies, from unusual Wi-Fi router configurations to complex siting arrangements. Dilemmas arose about where to place the Dustboxes so that they would not become soaked in rainstorms, or be nicked by passersby, but would also be located at suitable heights for detecting pollution.61 Technical investigations ensued to seek the best arrangement for the monitors in what were often collective outdoor spaces. Dustboxes became part of the furniture and part of the domestic arrangements in instances of home placements, and were also stealthy yard and patio ornaments lurking under out-of-use barbeques and other garden architecture. And the logbook took up residence along with other everyday items, marking and expressing commitments to working toward collective practices for building breathable worlds.

The collective process of setting up a citizen-sensing infrastructure became a way to materialize rights to data, air, and breathable worlds. These practices of building and connecting monitoring infrastructure express a right to constitute and transform modes of citizenship through attention to and engagement with urban milieus. Rights in this sense are expressed less through legal challenges, and more through collective inquiries into the “state of the air,” where the “state” here is not a nation but an ongoing social-political project of atmospheric citizenship as it meets urban, environmental, and data citizenships. While data citizens in part materialize through sensor-based data practices and infrastructures, they also mobilize along with the activation of rights that might help to mitigate and address the problem of air pollution.

How to Figure Citizen Data

Inevitably, the question then arises as to what can be done with data from these sensor devices, especially given the considerable effort involved in setting up monitors. How might it be possible to figure citizen data into forms of evidence that can support and mobilize rights to breathable worlds? Citizen data does not merely replicate or challenge official datasets. Instead, it can figure different worlds and call them into being by expressing lived experiences, recasting approaches to air pollution, and proposing different configurations of urban environments.62 I build on Donna Haraway’s discussion of figuring to consider how this is a way configuring, numbering, narrating—as well as creaturing—data.63 “Creaturing” is a concept that I have previously developed to express how data obtains relevance through the distinct worlds in which it is generated and has effect.64 Data in this sense is not simply descriptive of worlds. Instead, data and worlds are co-constituted as distinct modes of inhabitation and conditions where data have relevance. Citizen-sensing practices creature and story air pollution data by generating problems to which data responds and attaches, and for which data comes to have significance. Creaturing is a process whereby data can come to figure, or in other words, to matter. But as I suggest here, different creatures of air pollution data can also create sites of struggle in terms of the pluralistic data and urban worlds that matter or are sustained, overlooked, or extinguished.65

In this investigation into how citizen data can contribute to the formation of citizens of worlds, we then considered how to build on and develop analysis techniques that might distinctly figure and creature citizen data by connecting it to extended infrastructures and practices. Based on our earlier fracking research, we adapted our Airsift data analysis platform so that Dustbox data could be viewed and analyzed in relative real time. Monitoring locations were mapped with fuzzy locations, and data was open and available for viewing, analyzing, plotting, graphing, and downloading. We pulled in data from the London Air Quality Network API, so that citizen-sensing locations could be compared to nearby regulatory monitors. With this toolkit, people could investigate, review, and analyze their own data as well as other data in the network. In this sense, we developed the Airsift toolkit to enable DIY data analysis. This approach extended the attempt to democratize monitoring by also testing ways to democratize data analysis (while keeping in mind the pitfalls of democratization as a techno-political process and promise).

Because the air-quality data was not necessarily easy to analyze for people new to atmospheric science, we collaborated with participants to host data workshops and drop-in data tutorials to look more closely at patterns emerging in the data. In these meetings, we introduced the Airsift tool, worked through analyses of citizen datasets, compared data across different monitoring sites, and strategized about where else to place monitors and gather data in support of community projects. These exchanges surfaced questions and queries about how to engage with pollution in ways that connected to experiences, while also developing techniques for analyzing data and making atmospheric science legible within broader forms of urban engagement. We found that this spatially dense network of citizen-sensing devices allowed us to zero in on particular urban patterns, processes, and distributions of pollutants. Often working at the scale of one-hour and twenty-four-hour mean levels of particulate matter, we could analyze the specific and comparative timing and distribution of pollutants in the area, which allowed us to gain a much more detailed picture of urban activities underway.

With these analysis techniques, we discussed how data could assemble into different forms of evidence, which might be useful for informing policy, neighborhood plans, or other initiatives that responded to development, construction sites, and transport in this rapidly changing part of London. Using our Airsift toolkit, we plotted times of day and week when pollution was occurring, and often found increased pollution toward the end of week, with a decrease on Sundays (no doubt related to traffic, the primary source of pollution in London). Events such as Bonfire Night become clearly visible as elevated episodes in the data due to fireworks. And shared pollution patterns were spotted across proximate and in some cases distributed sensors, depending upon whether pollution was from regional or local sources.

As a register of urban environmental processes, the Dustbox data began to unfold in relation to everyday urban life. Moments when air pollutants registered at particularly high levels became an event where we would pool collective knowledge about industry activity, fires, pollution drifting in from Europe, or other events such as intensive construction that might help to explain peak readings. We also worked together to collect and analyze data from the London Air Quality Network (using air pollution data and alerts), from Lewisham Council (in the form of planning documents and air pollution apps), the UK Environment Agency (to document industrial monitoring sites), and the Greater London Authority (to incorporate tree maps and other data). In this sense, quantitative sensor data did not provide an absolute or definitive figuring of urban events. Instead, citizen data featured most significantly when multiple observations and other forms of data came together to corroborate and also transform lived urban experience.

If people collect data but it is closed down or inaccessible to analysis, then this practice might more accurately be referred to as crowdsourcing, since the data is owned and mined by actors other than the citizens who collect the data. Here, participants generated their own data that was open for further use, including through Airsift as a DIY data analysis toolkit. But data was more than “open” in the usual sense, since it was not simply a CSV file made available by a government entity in a data repository. Instead, it was embedded in situated monitoring and data-collection practices, as well as available for open analysis, and mobilized within projects to advocate for the urban environment. Data in this sense is less an enumeration of individual behaviors or conditions, and more of a collective resource and infrastructure that can be drawn upon to support exchanges across citizens and worlds, in ways that suggest a breathability of data as much as breathability of worlds.

Based on the multiple meetings, workshops, and conversations held with participants and residents, we collected our collective findings from the ten months of Dustbox monitoring in seven online and print-format Deptford Data Stories. We crafted the data stories as a collaborative method for figuring citizen-sensor data in the form of numerical measurements, maps, on-the-ground observations, images, and narratives about activity in the urban environment. The data stories composed the citizen data into distinct accounts of air pollution that could narrate overlooked urban experiences, while enabling collective proposals for transforming environments toward greater livability.66

In analyzing the citizen data, we found that major traffic intersections and construction activity, as well as the River Thames, all showed up as likely pollution sources, often at levels well above the WHO twenty-four-hour guideline of 25 µg/m³. We also found that green spaces and sheltered gardens often had much lower levels of PM_2.5. The process of arriving at these findings involved back-and-forth discussions about urban activity and likely emissions sources, queries about distinctive patterns in the data, site visits to inspect pollution activity, and negotiations about how and when data might be more widely circulated so that conversations could be held with local government and community groups.

Processes of collecting data, then, generated ways to figure, creature, and materialize rights in the making, including the right to data, the right to clean air, and the right to make breathable worlds. And yet, these rights were unevenly acknowledged by local and national government, industry and developers, and other “stakeholders.” While such rights are often not enforced or even recognized, data became a way to attempt to counteract the failure of rights or to activate the possibility of such rights in the making. I turn in the next section to consider more specifically how the right to breathable worlds—as a prospective right—materialized through data stories and community projects. Within this context, data practices differently addressed problems related to social, political, and environmental struggles by attempting to reinvent rights.

How to Pluralize Data Practices

Among the multiple sites where citizen sensing took place in Deptford and New Cross, we identified seven clusters of monitoring locations that became the basis for each of the seven data stories. One of these locations, Old Tidemill Garden, was an area where many people were interested to monitor since they hoped to demonstrate that the green space was beneficial in mitigating particulate matter levels. Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden was originally a school garden that was turned over to the public when the school moved. The space became a wild green oasis within a heavily developed and polluted urban area, where community groups hosted forest schools and biodiversity workshops, organized community picnics and music festivals, built adventure playgrounds and tended vegetable gardens, and generally fostered the creative and activist energy for which Deptford is well known.

But in 2016, developers sought planning permission to build a range of market-rate and social housing in the place of the Old Tidemill Wildlife community garden. Peabody Housing Association developed plans to raze the garden and nearby block of council housing in order to build flats to address a housing shortage in the area.70 Residents and workers were especially concerned about the loss of this community garden and adjacent social housing to high-rise (and more expensive) housing developments that would significantly alter the area. Here, the city was being made and remade, less as an expression of the right to build breathable worlds, and more as a set of development projects that led to ongoing struggles over urban environments.

Residents, workers, and advocates for the Old Tidemill Garden, including community groups Deptford Neighbourhood Action and Voice for Deptford among many others, began a campaign to save the green space in response to what they felt were inflexible and unjust development plans. They worked along with a design and architecture group to develop an alternative plan for the site that would preserve the green space and existing council housing, while also allowing for the development of new housing. The campaign and plans to save the space unfolded through a protracted struggle with the local council to draw attention to the significance of the green space, existing housing, and community ties that had built up over decades. People lobbied the local council, attended planning meetings, raised concerns at local ward assembly meetings, developed online campaigns on social media and websites, set up crowdfunding initiatives, worked with artists and designers to make films and host events, and publicized garden openings so that more people in the area would visit and learn about the space.71

In this context, several people who were engaged in the struggle against the development of the garden took up air-quality monitoring with Citizen Sense to develop yet another form of evidence that might aid their campaign. They sought to establish whether pollution was occurring on busy roads nearby, and if lower levels of pollution could be detected within the garden area. We located monitors on balconies and outdoor spaces adjacent to the garden. Over a several-month monitoring period, the sensor data demonstrated a clear pattern of lower pollution in areas sheltered by the garden, and higher pollution in areas exposed to busy roadways on the perimeter of the garden. These findings spurred proposals, which the data stories included, not only to protect the garden as an important green space in the area, but also to augment and extend green infrastructure to address and mitigate pollution in the area.

Despite the soundness of the citizen data, and the creative scope of the proposals put forward for how to preserve the garden while accommodating new development, the Council remained unmoved by the findings or proposals. It voted to approve the development plans and to terminate its lease on the garden. While it cited the need to address housing shortages as a rationale for developing the site, many dissenters noted that the development would not provide social housing at affordable rates of rent, yet it would remove access to a biodiverse green space. Here, citizen data did not facilitate or improve rights to data, environment, participation, or breathable worlds.

With the Council’s decision to forge ahead with the new housing and the turning over of the garden site to developers, multiple protests ensued. In August 2018, protestors began to occupy the garden site, which included numerous mature trees, to attempt to halt its demolition. Protestors, as well as news reports of the garden occupation, frequently cited the findings from their citizen-sensing data, noting the problem of air pollution in the area and the role of green space in providing relief from pollution. Mitigation of air pollution became a key rationale for saving the garden, among other points related to protecting its biodiversity, preserving local housing and the community that had been established, and providing housing at affordable rates of rent.72

Donning gas masks and holding placards with phrases including, “Deptford Needs to Breathe!” and “Lewisham’s Plans Cause Asthma,” protestors appealed to the need to address air pollution in the area, and to make more breathable worlds not just by reducing pollution levels but also by safeguarding limited green space. People seeking to protect the garden made a film to persuade viewers of its unique characteristics, while documenting how it made the area more breathable. The interviewee in the opening film sequence notes, “I just take a huge, deep breath is the first thing I do when I come in here,” in reference to entering the garden and being immersed in other urban encounters and experiences that do not require sealing oneself off from harsh, traffic-clogged, and polluted environments.73

Despite the presentation of these objections to the destruction of the garden, along with appeals to citizen data and multiple other forms of evidence mentioned throughout this chapter, the Council persisted in turning over the site to developers by removing occupiers of the garden in October 2018. To do so, it retained the use of the County Enforcement security firm, which also participated in enforcement activities during the UK miners’ strike in the 1980s. Many residents, workers, and protesters found this to be a particularly brutal and reprehensible measure taken by this Labour-dominated Council.74

In February 2019, the garden was leveled and trees were demolished. Residents continued to monitor this destruction, using photography and video to document scenes of trees being ripped from the ground and cast aside as the site became a staging area for another London high-rise.75 This was only one among many additional sites up for development in this compressed area. Shortly after developers leveled the garden and its trees, an additional seventy-four plane trees were felled to make way for the super sewer, and further trees were planned for demolition to build housing in which residents would not be able to open their windows during peak hours due to the elevated levels of air pollution in the area.76 People continued to lodge ongoing objections to these relentless developments, appealing to their evidence gathered about air pollution. Councilors, however, did not review the citizen data and in some cases are purported to have boasted that they had made up their minds about the importance of housing development, irrespective of citizens’ concerns about pollution and other damage to the environment and community fabric.77

When arguments about the unaffordability of the proposed urban housing were not heeded by the local council—on the basis that there was neither a specific “right” to affordable housing, nor did people feel as though rights would be respected—citizens combined further data about air pollution to document the impacts from construction and traffic and loss of green space. Yet despite the established right to breathe clean air, as well as the right to participate in environmental decision-making, these apparent guarantees of democratic engagement did not ensure that citizens would have a voice or be able to inform the shape and process of development in the area.78

The difficulty of mobilizing rights, and the likely failure of attempts to realize rights, can lead to the use of other tactics that attempt to contribute to the exchange, cultivation, and breathability of environments. Data citizens form through these practices of mobilizing evidence to support more democratic exchanges. Similar to the discussion in the previous chapter, at times the collection of citizen data can offer alternative forms of evidence that enable exchanges with regulators and developers, politicians and the press. Data can document and generate different registers of experience, and enable possibilities to be and become citizens of worlds. The citizen-sensing practices and proposals narrated within the data stories developed in response to impasses experienced, and attempts to advocate for different approaches to urban environments.

Yet data can also produce its own disappointments, and rather than serve as a corrective to rights, it can compound problems of democratic unaccountability. Data does not always perform as expected. It can be difficult to work with and analyze, but it can also lead to inertia and indifference on the part of regulators and policymakers who have fixed agendas and undemocratic practices. Some data counts more than others, and data needs to operate—and be creatured—within particular registers of relevance in order to be heard, apprehended, and mobilized. Data inequalities can take place not only in terms of whose data counts, but also whose data can register as legitimate and significant.79 These dynamics often unfold in relation to established dynamics of privilege and power, but are performed through more insidious dynamics of who gets to be counted as “the adult in the room.” The “good citizen,” as Claudia Rankine has suggested, is typically someone who does not speak truth to power, does not expose inequality, but does maintain a polite demeanor so as not to disrupt established conventions of civil and political conduct.80 Such practices of the good citizen tend to reproduce rather than remake existing power structures.

Customary ways of exercising the right to, moreover, can assume a universal, privileged, normative, masculine, white, and actively enabled form of citizenship. Such practices of citizenship would in part require that people struggle and confront injustices and exclusions, often in public forums and settings that favor some voices over others. In the process of attempting to exercise these rights, many struggling urbanites could be exhausted by the crushing indifference of political processes. As Berlant writes about such political engagements and attachments, people are “worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.”81

Citizen-sensing devices seemingly invoke rights to data, to environments, to monitor, and to breathable worlds. They promise to enable data citizenships that could redress the failure of rights. But the reinvention of rights requires worlds in which to take hold and become relevant. Data citizenships and citizen data do not solve the problem of partial rights and “citizenship contradictions.”82 Rather, they cultivate other strategies for making and remaking breathable worlds where data could become relevant. Through this process, citizen data can contribute to forms of action that reinvent rights, less as the pronouncement of universal, static, or fixed claims received in a uniform register, and more as attempts to build more breathable worlds within contingent, differential, and unequal environments. These practices express the right to monitor, the right to data, the right to participation, the right to environment, the right to experience, and the right to be political. But they do not assemble here as a straightforward implementation of a claim. Instead, they involve complex struggles to make worlds in which more just social and environmental conditions might be possible.

Such struggles can be generative of renewed conditions of citizenship in the making—as well as in the unmaking. As much as citizens and worlds are made and remade, they are also unmade and bound in to unworkable conditions. Technologies of citizenship might need to be formed, transformed, and unformed.83 These conditions are equally constitutive of data citizens, but are often overlooked by techno-optimistic narratives that would characterize these practices as effortlessly achieved. Making and remaking rights, citizens, and worlds is not an inherently liberatory process. Yet democratic engagement requires taking action that carries risks of uncertainty, disappointment, and failure.84 Rather than transcend struggles to contribute to democratic life, citizen-sensing and citizen-data practices become interlocked with and co-constituted by these ongoing social movements.

How to Make Urban Worlds with Citizen Data

The right to data and to breathable worlds would seem to promise that more democratic and liveable conditions could be realized through the collection and presentation of data. But as this discussion has suggested, it is not data for data’s sake that would activate these changes. Instead, rather than collecting data for regulatory compliance, citizen-monitoring practices instantiate the right to data as the right to make breathable worlds. By collecting data, citizens can further support and mobilize projects, identifying pollution hotspots. They can use data to intervene within and reshape environments. But data does not necessarily lead to action. The right to data is not a linear sequence that provokes the right to transform environments, along with the social-political relations that contribute to conditions of un/breathability. Instead, actions could already be underway, where data folds into and supports ongoing projects.

Deptford is an area with many fast-moving developments underway, including multiple construction projects taking place within the context of intense traffic, an incinerator, and river vessel pollution. At the same time, this area has a shortage of green space, a lack of sustainable transport, a high rate of poverty, and social and environmental injustice that is sedimented into the fabric of the neighborhood. Within this context, a second monitoring area, Deptford Park, became a key site where citizen data contributed to ongoing efforts to transform transportation use in the area.85 Several members of Deptford Folk, a community group working to improve parks in the area, installed Dustboxes to understand the effect of road transport on pollution levels, and to generally compare levels across the Borough.86 Deptford Folk was established in 2015 with the remit to “improve parks and the routes to them.” In a short span of time, they began projects to improve park infrastructure in the area, plant trees, and undertake transportation pilots by temporarily closing streets to automobile traffic. People were interested to monitor air quality to support and expand these ongoing initiatives. The SELCHP incinerator is also located within the Deptford Park neighborhood, so there was also interest to see whether emissions from this site and nearby waste transfer yards would show up in the citizen dataset.

When MP Vicky Foxcroft tweeted about her call for a debate in the House of Commons in relation to findings from the citizen data, Deptford Folk replied: “Let’s debate but also let’s take action: we’re planting more trees in #Deptford as part of #Evelyn200. We’re redesigning streets to reduce traffic and we’re supporting people to take up cycling.” This focus on “action” formed a key part of how Deptford Folk mobilized citizen data along with a multi-faceted set of initiatives underway in the area. With ten times more cars on the road in London than in 1949,87 the need to address congestion was keenly felt. In advance of establishing where specific pollution patterns were occurring, the group was already in the process of testing transportation pilots with Lewisham Council to undertake traffic calming. They were hosting cycle-repair workshops. And they were preparing a larger funding application with the walking and cycling charity, Sustrans, to apply for “Liveable Neighbourhoods” funding from Transport for London (TFL) so that concrete improvements to transportation could be implemented in the area. They used their preliminary citizen-sensing data from the area to support their bid, and to document how alternative transportation arrangements could benefit the area.

Yet citizen data did not unfold in an enlightenment-style trajectory, where once people had evidence of pollution they subsequently took action. Instead, Deptford Folk were already in the process of undertaking multiple initiatives to improve the local environment. These actions drew on data from planning portals, council documents, online datasets, websites, historic campaign activity (including John Evelyn’s 1661 proposal to plant trees to improve air quality), among many other resources. Citizen-sensing technologies and data did not deliver a simple pathway to action, but instead became enfolded in these multiple and accumulating forms of evidence that variously supported attempts to improve transport and streets. In this sense, citizen data also joined up in a pluralistic way with multiple observations and other datasets from community group members, partner organizations, planners, city hall, and more.

In late 2017, Deptford Folk learned that their collaborative Liveable Neighbourhoods bid submitted to TFL was successful, providing them with £2.9 million to undertake a larger study to develop sustainable transport in the area.88 From 2017 to 2019 they collaborated with Lewisham Council and other organizations, as well as local residents, to review streets and transport in the area. As they worked to join up fragmented cycle and pedestrian routes, connect green spaces, and create traffic-free areas, they frequently referred to the problem of air pollution as a key impetus for addressing excessive traffic in the area. Citizen data was mobilized in a supporting way to inform proposals for which streets to make traffic-free based on detected pollution hotspots. These proposals include addressing sedimented inequalities, including the uneven exposure to vehicle-based pollution in an area where many people do not own cars and are constrained in their ability to move around in an area without accessible walking, cycling, or public transport. With these proposals now having gone through community consultation, further work is still to be done to turn plans into interventions that could make this a more breathable urban milieu.

At the same time as these multiple community actions took place, Lewisham Council developed a series of air-quality actions, seemingly in response to findings from the citizen data but never explicitly acknowledged as such. The Council expanded its regulatory monitoring sites to include a fourth station in Deptford, as well as a fifth station that included a new monitoring supersite in Honor Oak Park. It developed a green infrastructure fund for community groups, and it undertook no-idling campaigns and supported traffic reduction initiatives.89 Yet these efforts to address air quality were somewhat disengaged from the citizens and research groups who had worked to document, analyze, and propose different approaches to addressing air pollution. They were also relatively short-lived, since Lewisham Council announced in late 2018 that it would cut its Strategic Air Quality Programme due to lack of funds, and would instead focus on regulatory and statutory air-quality requirements.90

The breathability of worlds shows up here as the need to transform urban milieus on the basis of felt and live conditions. Citizen data was not the singular impetus for these transformations (despite the claims of technology companies). Instead, data supported but did not precede ongoing projects. Data was not the precursor to action. It did, however, reinforce the need for action. It contributed to open-air instrumentalisms, along with the co-constitution of rights, citizens, and worlds in the making.91 This more processual and pluralistic set of data operations demonstrates how citizen data becomes enfolded into rights claims not as fixed discursive expressions of individuals, but instead as conditions of possibility that are constituted with and through urban-environmental actions and material practices that generate collectives and collective worlds. Rights and data are potentially reinvented in this way, as conditions that are put to the test through the very attempt to make and remake breathable worlds.

By building more breathable worlds, people also hoped to connect air pollution to the health of urban environments and reduce the negative effects of pollution. In this way, the Ella Roberta Family Foundation,92 named for a nine-year-old Black girl, Ella Kissi-Debrah, who died from asthma in this broader area of Southeast London, has also made a point of linking air pollution to the need to improve environmental conditions.93 Ella and her family lived 25 meters from the South Circular, one of the busiest roads in London. Despite her multiple trips to ICUs due to asthma attacks, medical workers did not address how air pollution from roadways could be a factor in her asthma. The Ella Roberta Family Foundation was granted a second inquest to attempt to establish air pollution as the cause of Ella’s death. The inquest was successful, and her death certificate now records air pollution as a cause of death.94 Such an action could more directly establish the consequences of unbreathable worlds, where pollution literally constricts and collapses the lungs of those most vulnerable and most exposed to emissions sources. Here, the right to creature data includes the ability to categorically state that air pollution does kill people—nearly nine million worldwide, 50,000 in the UK, including 10,000 in London, every year.95

Residents have continued to protest this inattention to and neglect of air quality, notably with a campaign for cleaner air, “Let Lewisham Breathe,” with Extinction Rebellion Lewisham.96 In June 2019, protestors undertook a rush-hour disruption in the morning hours from 7.30 to 9.30 on major roads in Southeast London, including the South Circular (where Ella Kissi-Debrah had lived), and the A2 (where citizen data had documented air pollution levels at six times WHO guidelines for twenty-four-hour averages). Protestors held signs that read, “This Air Is Killing Us,” “Lewisham Is Choking,” “Deptford Needs Trees to Breathe,” “Toxic Air Zone,” and ‘‘R.I.P Ella Kissi Debra 9 years old! Killed by pollution and asthma.” These same calls to breathability have gained renewed traction in 2020, where Black Lives Matter protests take place across London and in cities worldwide, and the effects of air pollution and deprivation exacerbate the impact of COVID-19, especially for ethnic minorities.97 Such events assemble into a perfect storm of unbreathability, where as one protestor’s placard paraphrasing Frantz Fanon noted, “We revolt because we can no longer breathe.”98