The Invisible Infrastructures of the Smog.

Text

High level of suspended particulates (PM10 and PM2,5) makes Polish air quality one of the worst in Europe. This is mainly related to the fact, that Polish individual energy consumption is based mainly on coal. Although the problem exists for quite long time now (since the 90s), it became a subject of public concern only recently. Citizens in big Polish cities started to pay more attention to air quality. Numbers of NGOs exclusively concerned with the problem (so-called Smog Alerts) have been created. NGOs not only direct the attention of policy makers, local politicians and public institution to poor air quality, but they also create alternative data infrastructure. This infrastructure consists on sensors and mobile applications (that makes the data easy to obtain by regular users). Recently the smog problem started to be the subject of private sector interest. Many companies sell simple sensors that can be used in home environment or create its own infrastructure and collect data in Polish cities. The latter are used by big web portals, that show information about air quality to millions of viewers every day. The question arises, what are the relations of different actors (public institutions, NGOs and private companies) involved with the air pollution controversy? To collect accurate and reliable data on suspended particulates it is necessary to calibrate measuring infrastructure and to standardize the way data will be indexed. On the level of technical standardisation and data infrastructure there are serious discrepancies between aforementioned stakeholders. Each one of them uses different sensors and
devices, adopts different legal norms, uses different analytical standards and different methods of data visualisation. It can cause many social consequences – e.g. private sector scales are simpler than those used by public institutions and makes its data more visually attractive, so their data has far more social range despite its lack of accuracy. In the paper I want to: 1) show the differences in the ways that data are collected and standardize by different stakeholders; 2) consider how those differences affect the possibilities of copperation between stakeholders. My research project is based on field research. The main part of the research are in-depth interviews conducted with representatives of inspectorates of environmental protection, NGOs and private sector.

License

Creative Commons Licence

Contributors

Contributed date

March 12, 2019 - 5:39am

Critical Commentary

The topics of "private sector interests", the diffencneces in social reactions and material enactments to the issue of smong makes this 4S conference paper key recourse in framing questions and issue.   

Source

Michał Wróblewski, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland. Paper presented at 2018 4S conference, in the  "Air Pollution Governance: Sites, Styles, Histories" session. 

Cite as

Michał Wróblewski and Nicolaus Copernicus, "The Invisible Infrastructures of the Smog. ", contributed by Parikshith Shashikumar, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 12 March 2019, accessed 29 March 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/invisible-infrastructures-smog