Paper by Gerid Hager et al: “…Citizen science has grown dramatically in recent years, with cities emerging as key hubs of participation and data creation. One well-known example is OpenStreetMap (OSM). It is considered human’s greatest collective, open source and volunteer-led initiative to map the Earth’s surface and one of the most successful, collectively maintained and regularly updated open datasets in history. Just in the last 60 minutes of writing this piece, 900 contributors made 184,688 map edits in 113 countries.1 It was started in an urban area – Regent’s Park in London – in 2004 (another decade before Townsend’s article). By 2009, Map Kibera,2 which is based on OSM, was the first ever-created map of Kibera in Nairobi, considered then one of the largest informal settlements in Africa. This community-driven effort literally put people on the map, acknowledging their existence in the city. As a result, city officials, who could no longer ignore this large community of city dwellers, started to consider Kibera in urban planning processes. Map Kibera is still ongoing today and has become a thriving ‘interactive community information project’, which has expanded to other informal settlement areas (Mathare and Mukuru), all backed by the Map Kibera Trust whose mission is to ‘increase influence and representation of marginalized communities through the creative use of digital tools for action’.
Though notable exceptions exist, the citizen science activities, which rely on human observation on the ground, are largely geared toward urban areas and human settlements, addressing topics around pollution, heat, greenspaces, odour and noise, traffic and flooding, to name just a few examples. These and many other citizen science initiatives are shaping policy by providing credible local data and mobilising civic action. Data from Sensor.Community3 are now integrated into the Netherlands’ official ‘Measure Together’ platform, where the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment calibrates volunteer measurements to support local decision making (Crowd4SDG, 2022). The Making Sense project translated community sensing into municipal action in Barcelona, where residents’ noise data prompted revised street-cleaning schedules (Coulson et al., 2017), while the Curious Noses project influenced Flemish election debates and strengthened the case for Low Emission Zones (Van Brussel and Huyse, 2019). Additionally, the D-NOSES project advanced odour governance by developing a municipal model to guide odour regulation, highlighting the utility and potential of citizen science and odour pollution for the EU Action Plan ‘Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water and Soil’.4
The urban bias in citizen science data is evident, even, where the subject matter is not primarily considered an urban-first topic…(More)”.
