Many populations spend ~90% of their time indoors, with household particulate matter being linked to millions of premature deaths worldwide. Particulate matter is currently measured using particle mass, particle number and particle size distribution metrics, with other metrics, such as particle surface area, likely to be of increasing importance in the future. Particulate mass is measured using gravimetric methods, tapered element oscillating microbalances and beta attenuation instruments and is best suited to use in compliance monitoring, trend analysis and high spatial resolution measurements. Particle number concentration is measured by Condensation Particle Counters, Optical Particle Counters and Diffusion Chargers. Particle number measurements are best suited to source characterization, trend analysis and ultrafine particle investigations. Particle size distributions are measured by gravimetric impactors, Scanning Mobility Particle Sizers, Aerodynamic Particle Sizers and Fast Mobility Particle Sizers. Particle size distribution measurements are most useful in source characterization and particulate matter property investigations, but most measurement options remain expensive and intrusive. However, we are on the cusp of a revolution in indoor air quality monitoring and management. Low-cost sensors have potential to facilitate personalized information about indoor air quality (IAQ), allowing citizens to reduce exposures to PM indoors and to resolve potential dichotomies between promoting healthy IAQ and energy efficient buildings. Indeed, the low cost will put this simple technology in the hands of citizens who wish to monitor their own IAQ in the home or workplace, to inform lifestyle decisions. Low-cost sensor networks also look promising as the solution to measuring spatial distributions of PM indoors, however, there are important sensor/data quality, technological and ethical barriers to address with this technology. An improved understanding of epidemiology is essential to identify which metrics correlate most with health effects, allowing indoor specific PM standards to be developed and to inform the future of experimental applications.
Inspired by Lefebvre’s meditation on the rhythms seen from his apartment in Paris, we develop a novel rhythmanalytic account of urban air pollution, its breathing-in and impact in vulnerable bodies. We conceptualise urban air pollution as entwined in its making and consequence with the diverse rhythms of technologies, social practices and socio-temporal structures, environmental and atmospheric processes, bodily movements in space and time, and rhythmically constituted corporeality. Through this interdisciplinary account we position urban air pollution as integral to the ‘beat’ of the city, both a product of and constituent part of its evolving spatiotemporal form. We build on this foundation to develop a polyrhythmic conceptualisation of how certain places and lives are more dominated by pollution than others. Unequal patternings are made through the structuring effects of rhythmic repetition and by fatal intersections between the rhythms of polluted air and unequal capacities to avoid harmful breathing in and to resist the arrhythmic corporeal consequences that can follow. Understanding inequalities as manifest not within a static landscape of spatial relations, but in sets of unequally unfolding and structured polyrhythmic relations has implications for revealing patterns of inequality and for extending evidence-making more deeply into how rhythms intersect. Which and whose rhythms are to be intervened in are also considered as key ethical and political questions. We draw out implications for activism and community action, and identify the potential for bringing rhythmanalysis into productive engagement with broader environmental justice concerns, including in relation to recent COVID-19 experiences.
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