RESEARCH ARTICLE Participatory Patterns in an International Air Quality Monitoring Initiative

The issue of sustainability is at the top of the political and societal agenda, being considered of extreme importance and urgency. Human individual action impacts the environment both locally (e.g., local air/water quality, noise disturbance) and globally (e.g., climate change, resource use). Urban environments represent a crucial example, with an increasing realiza-tion that the most effective way of producing a change is involving the citizens themselves in monitoring campaigns (a citizen science bottom-up approach). This is possible by devel-oping novel technologies and IT infrastructures enabling large citizen participation. Here, in the wider framework of one of the first such projects, we show results from an international competition where citizens were involved in mobile air pollution monitoring using low cos