Doing urban citizenship with (broken) digital data from an air pollution sensor

Digital technologies are increasingly enfolded in citizenship projects - from apps that contribute to the enactment of individual health maintenance for neoliberal citizens, through to more activist engagements using citizen-generated data for environmental justice. We use Sarah Pink and colleagues’ metaphor of ‘broken data’ to explore how one device – a commercially available pollution sensor – was anticipated and used in practice for such citizenship practices by volunteers in one city. The device, at one level, failed in many ways. It produced unreliable data doubles: digital representations of air that failed to correlate with users’ own embodied experiences or tacit knowledge. The data generated by the device failed to afford mitigating actions for personal citizenship responsibilities. The data generated could not be directly accessed, nor easily shared with others in ways conducive to collective action. The disconnects between haptic and digital data highlighted the instability of the sensor, as a hybrid of personal device and political tool. However, in grappling with their ‘broken’ air pollution data, participants mobilized different sensing capacities that afforded (with varying degrees of success) citizenship projects by enacting ‘responsible’ engagements with the city and other citizens, and with more activist imaginaries. Data practices, we suggest, happen alongside citizenship projects, but do not necessarily enable those projects.