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The idea for the project came from conversations with community members, who described concerns about their surrounding environment while questioning the value and safety of environmental data collected from sensor networks. These dialogues highlighted (1) the absence of effective public space strategies for making environmental information legible to community members, and (2) the importance of mediators, like designers and planners, in ensuring that environmental data are used to empower local communities. The responsive public space architecture and data network that makeup NPS address those problems. NPS is open-source, scalable, accessible, and geared to engage historically excluded communities. NPS puts data, analysis, and meaning generation into tactical and democratic contexts.
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The project is a public space installation, tested first in an indoor location and then deployed twice as part of the Gabriel Celebrations held in the African Burial Ground in Shockoe Bottom and once as part of the InLight public art exhibition at Great Shiplock Park. The components of the project are responsive lighting elements and environmental sensors. The lighting elements respond to changing environmental conditions. The choice of sensed environmental data varied each time based on community stakeholder input, including nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, noise, and motion. The project fused environmental and social justice movements, making the impacts of urban renewal and highway construction visible in the context of longstanding racist oppression in the neighborhood and sites.
The project is not fabricated out of sustainable material but features noise and air pollution issues through environmental sensing. Hence, as a tool and system approach it is addressing issues of urban sustainability and environmental justice. The project has no certificates, but we share all data and codes publicly as open-source access and Instructables. The project was exhibited at ECC Venice Biennale 2023 and is featured in research papers and book publications
Through legible and responsive public sensing design, Networked Public Space mediates between community-driven environmental resilience and justice and data-driven environmental planning. A critical, unresolved problem for urban technology is bridging data analytics with the creative design of public spaces - the most essential physical and social environment of our cities. Rather than focus on efficiency and optimization, the Networked Public Space (NPS) project explores how data-responsive urban design and infrastructure can deepen human relationships with their environment and empower individuals to take on the social and environmental challenges facing communities everywhere. NPS bridges the efforts of residents to enhance their communities and governmental and private management of public space and infrastructure. The environmental sensing installation measures environmental conditions in real-time, responding to conditions on site with changes in lighting, and also uploading the data for visualization online. These responsive sculptures bring environmental justice issues into conversation with the work of social justice activists. They highlight the history of the African Burial Ground that extends to its conditions today, from the erasure of “urban renewal” and construction of I-95 to ongoing air and noise pollution on the site. The sensors measured these pollutants and made them part of the visible fabric of urban space.
"There is a beautiful, illuminated line of columns crossing the burial ground. These are sensors designed to pick up the particles and pollutants in the air around us. If you are living in a neighborhood that is experiencing this kind of pollution, (...) this is open-access technology that you can create to track this information in your communities and to make your case, when you need to prove that something is not right (...)." Ana Edwards, Sacred Grounds Historical Reclamation Project
NPS is a research project led by Mona El Khafif and Andrew Mondschein. Mona El Khafif, PhD is an Associate Professor at UVA School of Architecture and Director of the Urban Design Program. Her research operates at multiple scales, examining the interdisciplinary aspects of urban design, temporary urbanism, urban prototyping, and strategies for the smart city. Andrew Mondschein, PhD AICP, is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. His research emphasizes the role of information and knowledge in fostering individual- and community-level agency over urban life and the environment.
https://www.networkedpublicspa...
