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Evidence can at times be most palpable through its absence. When the first COVID-19 lockdown took place in March 2020 as a way to 'flatten the curve' in the UK (and around the world), what became most evident were the clear skies and diminished levels of air pollution. The air and breathing became less of a burden, and more of a considered exchange. While many people rightly cautioned that the conditions that led to the absence of air pollution were harrowing and tragic circumstances in terms of loss of life and livelihood, the evidence of diminished air pollution did at the same time give cause to stop and consider how it might be possible to create more liveable and breathable worlds. 

The usual ways in which evidence about air pollution circulates is through the catastrophic numbers of deaths experienced every year due to poor air quality. As many as 8.8 million people die per year worldwide due to air pollution, which is now recognised to be a leading cause of death. Evidence amasses through mortality and morbidity statistics that convey the bodily burdens of pollution. Yet these burdens are not shared equally. Countries including India and China have some of the worst air pollution levels on the planet, and poorer people often bear the worst effects of environmental pollution. However, the evidence of worldwide death and illness in many ways misses the more granular details of who experiences and bears the effects of poor air quality, as well as the systemic environmental injustices and racism that often reinforce these material-spatial conditions. 

How then is it possible to tune in to air pollution? With the Citizen Sense research project, I have collaboratively investigated how citizen-sensing devices might make air pollution evident, while also querying the forms of evidence that these devices generate. Communities who use these devices and gather citizen data often find their evidence registers as suspect in relation to more official processes for observing and managing pollution. Yet these practices are demonstrating other ways of engaging with and mobilizing evidence. When and where air pollution is absent--for instance on traffic-free days, in parks and gardens, or on pedestrian streets--can provide an indication of how to create less polluting environments.

These forms of evidence are not static facts, or practices of merely making visible. Instead, by constituting conditions of legibility and possibility, they at once capture and propose ways of mobilizing evidence. Tuning in to pollution through citizen-sensing devices might make air quality evident as a numerical value, a temporal pattern, a situation within a specific milieu, a political process, a condition of neglect and injustice, and even a site of urban transformation.  

Jennifer Gabrys 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/23/coronavirus-pandemic-leading-to-huge-drop-in-air-pollution