FCJ-219 The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body
The article analyses the idea of the media city both from the perspective of sensors and monitoring of air pollution and as a more conceptual thread that relates to air pollution itself. Smart cities are layered urban arrangements that have carried forward their earlier technological legacy in terms of infrastructure and often also in terms of the residual air pollution, like photochemical smog. This sort of an understanding feeds an alternative way of understanding technological cities. The issue of the sensorial becomes a central focus of the article ranging from the experienced air pollution to its tracking and monitoring in remote sensing solutions. These two threads, sensors and the sensed city, lead to a conceptual argument that suggests to look at the technologies of smart city as an entanglement of the materiality of the pollution as the data that keeps also the media ecologies of big data circulating. Besides issues of political economy and governance, it also points to questions where is political citizenship located.