ABSTRACT
Recounting an ‘air walk’ held in the south London neighbourhoods of New Cross Gate and Deptford, Jennifer Gabrys’ ‘Air Walk: Monitoring Pollution and Experimenting with Speculative Forms of Participation’ explores how new arrangements and detections of air pollution brought about by the rise of low-cost environmental monitoring technologies might be further developed through practice-based research. The chapter discusses walking as an experiment with forms of participation, and as an entry point for developing distinct approaches to working with monitoring technologies. Moving from descriptive approaches of participation to generative experiments with participation, the walk sets in motion the sites, participant encounters, monitoring kit, infrastructures, urban situations and speculative practices as they come together in this context.
