Locative media applications as tools for good ecological citizens in the digital city

Abstract

Urbanisation generates a range of environmental issues that pose significant challenges for cities and their citizens. There is general consensus in the literature on ‘green citizenship’ that good urban ecological citizens have a responsibility to reduce their ecological footprint (Dobson, 2003). ‘Smart’ infrastructure and technologies, including locative media applications, are increasingly being deployed for this purpose. This thesis explores the different kinds of locative media applications that have been designed with the good ecological citizen in mind, and asks: what assumptions do these applications make about the rights, responsibilities and duties of the good ecological citizen in the digital city? In answering this question, this thesis surveys a range of applications, and offers a typology of applications with their associated images of the good citizen: • tools for sharing, in which the ‘good citizen’ is one who reduces consumption through the sharing of idle goods and assets; • tools for consumers, in which the ‘good citizen’ takes responsibility for the environmental consequences of their consumption by acting on information to allow them to make more ethical consumer decisions; • tools for citizen-sensing, in which the ‘good citizen’ actively collects data about urban environmental issues for use in scientific research and/or advocacy; and • tools for local environmental planning, through which the ‘good citizen’ collaborates with others and participates in a digital neighbourhood and local planning projects. Across these different types of locative media applications, the thesis asks: what counts as participation, whose interests do these different configurations of the ‘good citizen’ privilege, and what are the implications for urban ecological citizenship?