The smart transition: an opportunity for a sensor-based public-health risk governance?

ABSTRACT

This contribution analyses the promises and challenges of using bottom-up produced sensors data to manage public-health risks in the (smart) city. The article criticizes traditional ways of governing public-health risks with the aim to inspect the contribution that a sensor-based risk governance may bring to the fore. The failures of the top-down model serve to illustrate that the smart transformation of the city’s living environments may stimulate a better public-health risk governance and a new city’s utopia. The central question this contribution addresses is: How could the potential of a city’s network of sensors and of data infrastructures contribute to smartly realizing healthier cities, free from environmental risk? The central aim of the article is to reflect on the opportunity to combine top-down and bottom-up sensing approaches. In view of this aim, the complementary potential of top and bottom sensing is inspected. Citizen sensing practices are discussed as manifestation of the new public sphere and a taxonomy for a sensor-based risk governance is developed. The challenges hidden behind this arguably inclusive transition are dismantled.

KEYWORDS:

• Public-health risk
• smart city
• sensors
• citizen sensing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Anna Berti Suman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8973-8436

Notes

1. Lorentz Center workshop on ‘Multilateral Governance of Technological Risks’, 22–24 May 2017, Leiden, The Netherlands; workshop on ‘Citizen Science – Gamma Radiation, Noise Annoyance and Air Quality’ at the Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Milieu, 14 November 2017, Utrecht, The Netherlands; workshop on ‘(Un)taming Citizen Science’ at KU Leuven, 4 December 2017, Leuven, Belgium.

2. Annual NILG Forum 2017 on ‘Technocratic Law and Governance’ at The Netherlands Institute for Law and Governance, 30 November 2017, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Conference ‘Unpacking the “Accountability Paradox” in Expert-Based Decision-making’ at the Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, 1 December 2017, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

3. See http://citizensense.net/about/.

4. Definition by the Oxford English Dictionary, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/risk (accessed 16/09/2017).

5. WHO website, http://www.who.int/topics/risk_factors/en/ (accessed 20/09/2017).

6. WHO website, http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Health-systems/public-health-services/public-health-services (accessed 20/09/2017).