From complaints to insights: A geographical analysis of illegal dumping by citizen sensor data

As urban areas expand, urban environmental quality assessment becomes increasingly crucial. We investigate the interaction between human experience and the urban environment at the street scale, using illegal dumping sites as indicators of urban liveability deterioration. We tackle the methodological challenge of working with citizen-generated data from Fix My Street (FMS) Brussels to study whether urban and social environments influence illegal dumping occurrence. FMS is a platform where individuals can complain about incidents in public spaces, such as clogged sewer grids, malfunctioning public lamps, or instances of illegal dumping. To mitigate selection bias in FMS, we compare 45,569 illegal dumping incidents with 53,516 “control” incidents. Our results suggest that illegal dumping typically takes place in a narrow, quiet, low-income, residential street and often under a tree. Emphasizing the need to account for local specificities, we use a geographically weighted regression to observe spatial contrasts. Our study underscores the significance of informal social control, social deprivation, and the disorder effect (illegal dumping more likely to recur in previously affected areas) in addressing urban liveability deterioration. Future research should explore innovative ways to measure informal social control and the disorder effect.