It’s 2025 and that marks the start of the third year of CitiObs! We have had an amazing two years working together as a consortium and building strong connections with our stakeholders and Citizen Observatories. We have a lot planned for the coming year but first, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate the cases that started it all—the Front Runners.
So, let’s recap. We have 5 Front Runner cases (FRC): Athens, Greece; Barcelona, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; Kristiansand, Norway; and Rotterdam, Netherlands. Each city is home to hundreds of thousands of people, diverse nature, complicated socio-environmental dilemmas, and citizen observatories working to make their city healthier and more liveable. For the past two years, CitiObs has been working with citizen observatories in each of these cities, guiding them in their interactions with citizens, scientists, and public authorities and in their air quality monitoring through the use of sensors. In 2024, the FRCs focused mainly on prioritizing their needs for their CO and how CitiObs can best support them and subsequently participating in mentoring sessions on various topics led by experts from the CitiObs team. While all of this was going on within our project, each Front Runner City was facing its own challenges and triumphs in the name of air pollution and a healthier urban environment. Let’s take a look at the 2024 journeys for the cases and for the cities themselves:
Athens hit the ground running in 2024 with a Mutual Learning Workshop in January. They had an array of decision-makers, citizens, and scientists in the room. This made for a fruitful discussion that identified and prioritized the needs of the Citizen Observatories and how best CitiObs can assist them. Fast forward to the end of the year and Athens finished with a powerful mentoring session on the CitiObs Leave-No-One-Behind Toolkit. This session spoke to some important, previously expressed concerns of these COs, namely that they know of citizens “living under challenging environmental and economic conditions” and that engaging the “marginalized and under-represented groups is highly important”.
In a year that brought numerous natural phenomena and disasters to Greece, degrading air quality and threatening people’s health, those insights from our stakeholders echo. In April, Athens and other southern parts of the country were hit by what’s known as a Saharan dust cloud; the air was filled with dust particles brought by the wind from the Sahara Desert, turning the sky red and eliciting official warnings about the risks posed to breathing and specifically for those with underlying health conditions. The summer of 2024 brought with it a slew of wildfires in Greece. A particularly bad one burned in the province of Attica, where Athens is located, and severely impacted the air quality in the city prompting news headlines such as “Capital’s air quality reaches dangerous levels”.
While we can’t prevent these harmful natural occurrences, they underscore the importance of mitigating other, avoidable causes of air pollution and remind us to strive for high levels of awareness and resiliency in our cities.
Wildfires weren’t the only type of fire that affected the cities of CitiObs last year. Significant industrial fires broke out in Dublin and Rotterdam, prompting concerns about local air quality and directives from local authorities to take precautions. In general, industrial fires pose a major public health risk in urban areas as they are known to increase particulate matter pollution; and yet, the impacts of industrial fires on local air quality and health are under-researched. The fire in Rotterdam was in the shipping port, the 10th largest in the world and in 2022 it was ranked the most polluting port in Europe. Shipping ports are known for high levels of air pollution that not only affect the nearest port neighbourhoods but also the city centres.
With our CitiObs social-justice glasses on, it is also critical to acknowledge that industrial sites are often situated closer to minority and lower socio-economic neighbourhoods. When we take a close look, it seems that these dynamics are indeed at play in our CitiObs cities. The Dublin fire took place in Coolock in the city’s northside, which has “significantly greater ethnic diversity” than the rest of Dublin; the northside also has “significant clusters of high deprivation”, meaning high levels of people living in poverty. While this is certainly not evidence enough to know if there is systemic inequality in Dublin’s zoning laws, it is a concrete reminder that the work we do in CitiObs for the Participation Dynamics toolkit or the Leave-No-One-Behind toolkit is relevant and needed for the diverse and complex urban dynamics of European cities.
Evidently, this is something our COs in Dublin are aware of. After discussing the challenges they are facing and how best to address them during a meeting in March 2024, Dublin also chose to participate in a mentoring session on the Leave No One Behind Toolkit as well as a mentoring session on the Improving Access and Interoperability of Citizen-generated Data toolkit, making the autumn of 2024 a busy one! At the same time, Rotterdam, Barcelona, and Kristiansand mirrored the March meeting on prioritizing needs, which were followed up in various ways across the FRCs. Rotterdam contemplated which CitiObs toolkits would be most beneficial for them during a Mentoring Exploration meeting in September and Kristiansand strategized on how best to monitor industry pollution during a strategy meeting in November to discuss which mentoring sessions they would like to hold with CitiObs experts. Barcelona showed strength in collaboration as they engaged with stakeholders from academia, administration, and citizen science initiatives who all had a reason to celebrate since the city’s air pollution was within legal limits for the second year in a row!
This is just a snapshot of what happened in 2024 for the cities and COs involved in CitiObs. We are grateful to reflect on such a prolific year and we stand in solidarity with those who faced urban challenges and dangers. As for 2025, January has been a whirlwind already as we are growing our CitiObs family with the Alliance cases. Keep in touch with us to learn where and who they are!
