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Abstract: In Providence, RI, environmental justice and community health advocates have called for a better understanding of the city’s air quality and its impacts on vulnerable populations. Inspired by these calls, Breathe Providence launched in 2022 as a community-scale network of low-cost air pollution sensors. However, there persists a disconnect between traditional methods of evaluating air pollution and Providence residents’ experiences of air quality, which may not always align with how regulations are structured and what can be measured with available technology. Consequently, there is a need to bring academic and community expertise together to investigate these issues using non-traditional methods. In the fall of 2023, Breathe Providence, the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee, and a community research consultant convened the Resident Task Force, a cohort of 11 community members concerned about environmental justice and health. Via six monthly sessions, the group identified and researched questions rooted in Task Force members’ first-hand experiences of air pollution. Members’ perceptions and priorities were driven by health and quality-of-life impacts—what they felt, saw, and smelled. One primary issue raised by the group was noxious odors surrounding the Port of Providence and other industrial areas. In an effort to collect data that reflected this experience, Task Force members adopted the CREATE Lab’s Smell My City app as a tool to track odors by their intensity, type, impact, and location. Members also practiced documenting their pollution observations through journaling and artistic exercises. Outcomes of this work include 1) Task Force members’ increased understanding of themselves as data sources, 2) the identification of tools for documenting lived experiences of pollution, and 3) the collection of a crowdsourced dataset via the Smell My City app, which captures pollution impacts beyond what can be represented by criteria pollutant measurements. These results offer concrete insight into the extent and impact of the noxious odor issue as well as demonstrate the value of this model of community engagement and knowledge production. Findings from the Task Force and Smell My City are now playing a key role in Providence’s and Rhode Island’s plans to reform systems for odor reporting and control.
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Note: funding: Funding provided by Clean Air Fund
Genre: posters
Access Condition: use and reproduction: All rights reserved
Access Condition: rights statement (href="http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/"): In Copyright
Access Condition: restriction on access: All Rights Reserved
Identifier: DOI: 10.26300/edvz-ec48