Political airs: From monitoring to attuned sensing air pollution

Abstract

In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid's City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public's participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid's chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention.

The optics of noncommunicable diseases: from lifestyle to environmental toxicity

“…Public health engagement with NCDs has, thus far lacked the concern with social (in)justice, activism and advocacy that has long characterised the environmental justice movement. Making toxicity ‘knowable and accountable’ through the policy sphere of NCDs might go some way to opening‐up much‐needed spaces for the kinds of ‘citizen intervention’ (Cavillo ) that could ensure greater global action.…”

“…Yet, the inclusion of air pollution as a NCD risk factor draws attention to the health effects of ambient and inescapable air, the toxicity of which exhibits significant and complex spatial variations (Li ). Moreover and as with all toxins, measuring individual exposure is inherently complex (Cavillo ) and the process of ascribing health effects to air pollution is subject to significant uncertainty (Jerrett et al . 2017, Kwan ).…”

Breathing in the polyrhythmic city: A spatiotemporal, rhythmanalytic account of urban air pollution and its inequalities

“…The evidence that underpins most inequality analysis is that generated by metrological regimes of air pollution monitoring (Barry, 2005). These typically involve measurement at sparsely located monitoring stations undertaken at coarse through to finer temporal resolutions (Buzzelli, 2008;Calvillo, 2018), along sometimes with modelling techniques that can be can be used to 'fill the space' between monitoring stations, generating a dynamic air quality surface (Buzzelli, 2018). Such finer grained spatiotemporal representations of air quality are not though routinely available for many urban places around the world, meaning that in practice much of the intrinsic rhythmicity we have been concerned with is invisible or obscured.…”

The auger

“…Rather, by taking a technique that normally exists within the domain of natural sciences or legal arbitration, and using it to publicly interpellate the soil as contaminated, soil coring emerges as a technique for sensing injustice. It demonstrates that "toxicity is not only about quantifiable concentrations embodied in bioscientific ways of knowing, but is also about cultural understandings of it" (Calvillo 2018). A scientific demonstration of the presence of toxicants in these soils cannot be divorced from the questions of injustice that such toxicity implies.…”