1. Governance in complex urban environments

The overarching theoretical frame of this study is that of governance and specifically the urban governance literature. Indeed, from this (rich) body of literature we take concepts such as “complex city”, “civic participation”, (perceived or actual) “governance failure” and “lack of implementation”. Key here is the notion of “governance” from Borraz and Le Galès,Footnote ²⁴ who define it as a process of “coordinating actors, social groups, and institutions to attain particular goals, discussed and defined collectively in fragmented, uncertain environments”. This notion of “fragmented” and “uncertain” spaces resonates with the assumption that cities are complex systems.Footnote ²⁵ This complexity is even more visible if one considers that cities are “networks of social interaction embedded in physical space”.Footnote ²⁶ Under this perspective, the city not only represents a physical space but also a set of interactions. Problems stemming from public policies that struggle to meet the demands of different groups are framed as “governance failures”.Footnote ²⁷ Exactly such failures are fertile ground for the rise of forms of civic innovations, such as the cases we discuss here.

Service provision is central in urban governance as one of the key functions of the city system. It also includes care for green areas, water resources and waste. Environmental monitoring by city authorities could be conceived of as a public service. However, the existing literature on urban governance and public service innovation does not deal at present with instances where forms of public services are provided by local people rather than by appointed institutional or private actors. This can be seen as a form of expanding the traditional notion of public service in a horizontal and decentralised way. Our article brings up this discussion as an opportunity to innovate the approach to public services provision by embracing contributions from the grassroots. Reliance on civic monitoring can also be seen as a “new strategy of governing”,Footnote ²⁸ not inviting people to participate but actually embracing and supporting existing forms of spontaneous civic intervention in order to truly achieve “polycentric” governance.Footnote ²⁹

Making a parallel with what is stressed in the literature on risk governance, stakeholders need to join forces to tackle complex and uncertain problems.Footnote ³⁰ This is applicable to (environmental) risks as much as to complex city matters. The described polycentric governance is especially desirable in cases of “wicked problems”. In our cases description, we illustrate how the city’s problems that we discuss are highly divisive, entangled and untamed, which can cause institutional difficulty in addressing them. Despite a paucity of relevant literature, practitioners and researchers are increasingly linking urban issues framed as “wicked problems” to community monitoring as a resource for informing strategies and interventions.Footnote ³¹ We aim to enrich such emerging discussions with our contribution.

As Termeer and Dewulf suggest,Footnote ³² “wicked problems” can (also) be tackled through a “small win” approach. These authors develop a framework for understanding governance change deriving from bottom-up, accumulative processes of change (ie “small wins”) that differ from large-scale, high-gain (but also high-risk and often slow) interventions. Civic monitoring as a form of complementing existing public services and (at times) contesting mainstream approaches and demanding changes can be framed as a “small win” that could potentially instil incremental change in the system. This perspective – to our knowledge – is rarely addressed in the literature (among the few studies going in this direction we recommend the work of Gabrys et al on “just good enough data”).Footnote ³³

Our “small win in reaction to wicked problems” frame is situated in a specific field of urban governance that encompasses environmental and social justice and (participatory) climate urbanism literature. Citing Bulkeley,Footnote ³⁴ we look at the cases studied with a view to an expanded notion of “climate urbanism” in which “the challenge of addressing climate change is recognised as deeply connected to wider issues of sustainable development and social justice”. The environmental justice perspective in its earliest days already recognised the interrelation between environmental and social justice. Indeed, contaminating and environmentally damaging activities often threaten less advantaged communities to a greater extent than more advantaged ones, contributing to reinforcing the economic and social inequality already in place. ^{Footnote 35} This happens not only in the Global South (this being a relative notion), but also in urban peripheries. Increasingly, such struggles are also linked to climate politics. In our article, we will build on these highly intertwined bodies of literature and link them to discourses on citizen science.

2. “Extreme” citizen science enters the city

“Citizen science” is a contested term, but it has been defined as “the active participation of lay people in scientific research”, ^{Footnote 36} a notion that should be understood in its diversity and plurality.Footnote ³⁷ Citizen science is an umbrella concept also including citizen sensing, a form of citizen science characterised by a focus on sensing (through low-cost technologies or through people’s own senses). Citizen sensing has been more specifically framed as “a technology, a social phenomenon and a method entailing ordinary people acting as intelligent interpreters through … networks … on which they actively observe, collect, analyse, report, and disseminate risk information with the aim of influencing risk policy-making and claiming environmental rights”. ^{Footnote 38}

Citizen science, as a resource and an approach appropriated by (organised) civil society, represents an opportunity to combine scientific research with environmental protection and with the enhancement of social and environmental justice. As underlined by Pykett et al and other authors, ^{Footnote 39} citizen science can leverage impacts at individual, societal or community levels. Social benefits can stem directly from the whole engagement process through which the citizens perceive themselves as being back in control of environmental information and are able to take decisions or make claims on the basis of this information. Environmental justice outcomes are visible when citizens can ground their arguments on the data gathered and when they can actually manage to be heard. This can occur through governmental interventions, which can be framed as the policy uptake of citizen science, ^{Footnote 40} or through courts; that is, a sort of judicial uptake of citizen-collected evidence (as experiences from EuropeFootnote ⁴¹ and the USA ^{Footnote 42} teach us).

We analyse both initiatives discussed in our study through the frame that citizen science and the sensing literature offer. In particular, we will use the concept of “extreme citizen science”, ^{Footnote 43} which, by other authors, has been defined as “reactive citizen science”. ^{Footnote 44} The adjective “extreme” means that the citizen science initiative comes from the grassroots (ie it is developed by grassroots actors that engage others without passing through the government, the private sector or academia), it is highly non-hierarchical (ie every participant can play a role in every stage of the process) and it is deeply co-created (ie the participants are engaged from the stage of problem definition up to the analysis and dissemination of results).

In short, in extreme citizen science, ordinary people, such as individuals or organized civil society (eg associations), shape the initiative from the very first stages to the end. This makes it different from other types of citizen science initiatives. For example, academia- or government-led initiatives generally engage the people after the research design/problem identification stage and do not necessarily engage them in the phases that come after data collection. The private sector may chip in by providing funding, tools or data infrastructures and by sponsoring an initiative, generally asking for data in return.

These second (academia-led) and third (government-led) types of initiatives are generally more “domesticated” (embracing Law et al’s conceptualisation of “domestication”Footnote ⁴⁵ ) in the sense that they are born in cooperation with institutions and tend to have contributing rather than challenging goals. Extreme forms of citizen science instead tend to “challenge” the system. This concept can also mean “at the extremes” (ie citizen science in conflictive contexts such as that of a complex city). Following King et al’s categorisation, ^{Footnote 46} extreme or reactive citizen science stems from a local and localised issue perceived as urgent by the community. The collection of data aims at tackling exactly that problem. The generated knowledge can empower local groups and support their activities, allowing them to engage in discussions with scientists and decision-makers based on evidence, eventually contesting existing environmental governance approaches.

In extreme forms of citizen science, the engaged individuals are not passive collectors of data (or even just producers, as we become every day simply by using social media and smartphones), but rather protagonists who can shape all phases of knowledge production. They become central in the identification of the problem and of the methodologies to analyse it, in the construction of communication and advocacy strategies that look at policy planning from the perspective of a sought change, up to the possibility that the knowledge generated represents the basis of legal enforcement aimed at re-establishing social and environmental justice.

That said, it is worth stressing that categories such as citizen science and sensing are extremely blurred. Turreira-García et al note that – despite several projects claiming to conduct participatory environmental monitoring – what is actually meant by “participation” continues to manifest in many different forms. ^{Footnote 47} Another possible connotation of these initiatives would be that of “community-based monitoring”. This notion can be considered adjacent to those of citizen science and citizen sensing but having a stronger focus on the engagement of the whole community. ^{Footnote 48}

As Butkevičienė et al summarised, ^{Footnote 49} citizen science can also be framed as a form of and accelerator of social innovation. Innovation stemming from citizen science is based on three main dimensions (content, process and empowerment) ^{Footnote 50} and can be process-oriented and/or goal-oriented. ^{Footnote 51} Furthermore, the type of monitoring at issue here is particularly aimed at stimulating political innovation or political change based on the findings gathered by local people. As noted in the literature, citizen sensing has the distinctive feature of stressing the “claims that citizens can make with data”. ^{Footnote 52} Gabrys et al distinguish between a long-standing typology of citizen science mostly entailing amateur monitoring of biodiversity, such as birdwatching, and the emerging field – in which citizen sensing would be inserted – of citizen science “invoking the political possibilities of this data”. ^{Footnote 53}

We refer to the “citizen sensing paradigm” to embrace exactly this political dimension of civic monitoring. Such a political dimension entails regarding civic monitoring beyond what it is (ie environmental data collection by ordinary people) and considering it also as a form of appropriation of existing technological, scientific and legal resources to demand interventions from the institutional side.Footnote ⁵⁴ It stems from a sense of dissatisfaction and distrust towards the way a matter is managed by competent authorities and has the clear objective of changing the status quo. Civic monitoring can be regarded as a response to (perceived or actual) governance failures and governmental struggles.

1. Background of the initiatives

2. The RomaUP Tiber monitoring initiative

The RomaUP initiative aimed at improving the engagement of local people in watching over the status of their local resources, in particular by monitoring the Tiber. Local inhabitants joined in with the monitoring, as they were worried for their river based on scientific data already availableFootnote ⁷³ and on the widespread perception that competent institutions were not doing enough to assess the river’s status. Civic groups sensitive to environmental issues from other areas of the city also joined the project. Therefore, participants were mostly people who already cared about environmental issues in general or who lived along the river and felt concerned regarding its degradation. They believed that public monitoring was performed only in a limited number of spots and with limited intervention capacity.

One of the biggest concerns that motivated the participants to monitor the river quality stems from the fact that the local water utility, Acea, had already built a purification plant (which serves the northern part of the city) to make the Tiber’s water drinkable and had pushed for the construction of other similar plants. Therefore, it appeared urgent to acquire some basic information about the river’s water quality. Furthermore, participants were even more motivated due to the fact that during the year 2020 there were recurrent fish deaths in the Tiber. These were perceived as very anomalous events for a large river like the Tiber – demonstrating a high level of ecosystem degradation – and they increased the sense of distrust among the local citizens towards the institutional governance of the river.

Local committees, associations and individual citizens joined in with the monitoring using tools such as that displayed in Figure 1. Approximately ten organizations and approximately fifty individual participants took part in the monitoring, although A Sud aimed at engaging at least 100 people. Thus, A Sud also worked on organising public initiatives for engaging more local inhabitants.Footnote ⁷⁴ In the end, the social uptake of the initiativeFootnote ⁷⁵ was lower than what was desired, partially due to the restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the first monitoring corresponded with the first day of the lockdown in Rome. In the lockdown period and its aftermath, people tended to remain isolated, limiting their social relationships. Thus, it was difficult for A Sud to involve new people.

Figure 1:

Instrument to monitor the temperature, conductivity and other parameters of water at a sampling point north of Rome (photograph by A Sud).

Nonetheless, the project attracted the attention of other civic groups, such as Agenda Tevere, ^{Footnote 76} an association promoting the joint management of the river with local actors through a “river contract” scheme. A “river contract” is a scheme through which the interventions of public administrations, water management services, private actors, associations and other organised local actors are coordinated to achieve the objective of river preservation and flourishing. The gathering of collective knowledge relating to a river can be a component of implementing a river contract. Interestingly, the establishment of a “river contract” had already taken place for the Aniene back in 2002.

In order to define the monitoring strategy, the civic actors engaged a river ecologist who was also experienced with citizen science. Remarkably, the expert was engaged by the civic groups and not vice versa (ie the scientist driving the initiative who engages the citizens, which is the more common pattern, as can be witnessed for citizen science projects in the health domain such as GenigmaFootnote ⁷⁷ and Stall CatchersFootnote ⁷⁸ ). The participants jointly decided that they wanted to estimate the diffuse pollution of the river’s water, so the monitoring sites were chosen to characterise the entire urban stretch of Rome as homogeneously as possible. The only exception was the sampling point located in correspondence with the intake of the Grottarossa drinking water plant, which was identified in order to monitor the quality of water captured, purified and then fed into the water network for the drinking water supply. In total, eight monitoring sites were selected, all located within the Grande Raccordo Anulare (the ring road surrounding Rome). One of them was set at Ponte Salario on the Aniene in order to evaluate the contribution of this stream to the Tiber.

Based on scientific advice from the engaged river ecologist (but also due to budget constraints impeding more frequent measurements), each month, starting from March 2021 and continuing for one year, volunteers monitored water quality using portable and easy-to-operate water kits (see Figures 1 and 2). They gathered data on chemical and physical parameters such as conductivity, total suspended solids, pH (ie potential of hydrogen, measuring the acidity or alkalinity of water), temperature and turbidity.Footnote ⁷⁹ Data on these parameters were collected as they provide basic information about the characterisation of a water body. Any change from a standard range may indicate some disturbance in the system. In addition, data on nitrates, phosphates and ammonium ions (NH₄ ⁺) were also measured, which are alarm parameters indicating a potential critical condition associated with oxygen deficiency (ie anoxia). This deficiency is a particularly concerning condition for the entire river ecosystem and it was considered by A Sud to be a potential cause of the fish deaths that had occurred in the river, as described earlier.Footnote ⁸⁰ The monitoring campaigns carried out by RomaUP have partially confirmed the hypothesis that “anoxic bubbles” (ie conditions of the absence of oxygen in water) could have caused these fish deaths. However, given the characteristics of the river in the sections monitored, A Sud also recognises that these instances could have been triggered by a series of concomitant factors.Footnote ⁸¹ Finally, the water samples collected by the participants have also been analysed – this time through laboratory analyses – to assess whether there were traces of glyphosate (which was found once in the samples) and herbicides. These are harmful substances that are widely used in agriculture and often also in urban contexts.

Figure 2:

Water sampling in the southern part of Rome, close to the Acea purification plant (photograph by A Sud).

In terms of the actual deployment of the initiative, the monitoring of the listed parameters was carried out according to the methods developed by Fresh Water Watch, ^{Footnote 82} a global citizen science project from Earthwatch Europe aimed at researching and protecting freshwater resources. This is remarkable as it shows that even small-scale, local forms of civic monitoring can take inspiration from and be amplified by larger-scale citizen science initiatives. Each sampling from RomaUP is uploaded on the platform of the Fresh Water Watch Citizen Science Observatory. ^{Footnote 83} This makes the local data visible to wider audiences.

3. The Walk Up Aniene monitoring project

Building on the larger RomaUP initiative, local civil society actors, such as the non-profit Insieme per l’Aniene, ^{Footnote 84} with the guidance of A Sud, developed the Walk Up Aniene project. The initiative aimed at monitoring the status of the Aniene throughout the Nature Reserve of the Aniene Valley. ^{Footnote 85} The project was supported by the Horizon 2020 ACTION programme. This shows a virtuous circle entailing further interventions stemming from an existing and more established civic monitoring reality. Walk Up Aniene has facilitated the engagement of approximately 100 participants from the city of Rome (all joining the training and half of them also joining the monitoring), demonstrating greater social uptake compared to RomaUP.

The main driver of the initiative was the fact that data on the environmental status of the Aniene were fragmented and/or not up to date, mostly due to the lack of economic resources for the systematic collection and dissemination of river data. ^{Footnote 86} From the need to deepen existing knowledge on the status of the reserve, Walk Up Aniene aimed at building a civic knowledge base in order to highlight priorities for action and elements to be taken into account for management policies.

After training the participants, the project ran systematic and continuous sampling of the Aniene river shaft (ie the riparian area and immediate surroundings) using two survey instruments: the “Evaluation Sheet of the Ecomorphological Quality” of a watercourse ^{Footnote 87} and the “Fluvial Functionality Index”. ^{Footnote 88} Applying both methods and comparing the results improved data granularity and accuracy. By joining and simplifying both survey instruments into one accessible observation questionnaire, Walk Up Aniene made it easier for ordinary people to collect information on the status of the riverbanks, a task previously performed only by researchers. This multiplied the granularity of the measurements, now covering river stretches along the entire reserve. As participants had received training on standard scientific methods for water sampling (these methods had been adapted to be undertaken by ordinary people), they were able to perform state-of-the-art measurements that are comparable to those performed by professional scientists.

In terms of social uptake and scientific quality of the initiative, the citizens’ participation has been shown to be quick and successful both in terms of numbers of people engaged as well as in terms of the quality of the data collected. Walk Up Aniene proved to be an efficient engagement strategy to reach those citizens who were concerned for the reserve or were interested in the broader topics covered (urban nature preservation, ecology research, civic monitoring, etc.). In this endeavour, the depth of the network of the promoters and their capacity to reach local inhabitants, community leaders, local committees and schools have been fundamental. The presence of an active local association taking care of the park promoted the engagement of local dwellers who, being unable to travel much due to the COVID-19 restrictions, could rediscover nature close to their homes.

The participants used tools commonly used in the field of monitoring (observation questionnaires, mobile technologies; ie the Epicollect application ^{Footnote 89} ) to build up the database on the status of the Aniene. Although data quality in citizen science projects is frequently called into question,Footnote ⁹⁰ the quality control processes carried out on the collected data showed these data to be fully satisfactory, achieving 85 per cent reliability according to the final report of the initiative. ^{Footnote 91} Furthermore, the results of the individual evaluation sheets for each sampling point showed discrete correspondence, which can be read as an indication of the accurate acquisition of knowledge on how to conduct the monitoring during the training prior to the fieldwork. Furthermore, the civic monitoring scheme that was followed proved to be an easily replicable operational model in other locations.

The results of the data collection for Walk Up Aniene show better river quality and functionality in river sections that are more distant from the city centre, whereas the environmental status of the river and its banks are more compromised in the more urbanised areas and at the confluence with the Tiber.Footnote ⁹² This confirmed the concerns of the participants that river degradation is probably due to the numerous illegal dumpsites and settlements along the urban riverbanks. Interestingly, the results enabled an understanding to be gained regarding which factors had the greatest impacts on the final evaluation of the environmental status of each stretch or bank, making it possible to hypothesise causes and corrective actions to be taken. Among other things, the data show that the quality of the riparian vegetation is the most affected system in the overall area studied, and it is also the factor contributing the most to general environmental quality.Footnote ⁹³

The civic monitoring delivered a complete picture of the riparian river area (see Figure 3), highlighting places of greatest importance for the conservation of the river environment, those at the greatest risk of deterioration and hydrogeological instability and those of greatest ecological value. ^{Footnote 94} Such data are expected to facilitate a science-based dialogue with competent institutions in order to inform and steer interventions in the Aniene Valley. In particular, the production of a final report based on the initiative’s findings that includes recommendations ^{Footnote 95} will help to better focus future research and advocacy actions directed at authorities. This knowledge could be particularly useful to those public and private entities that in the future will design and implement interventions within the Aniene basin. Such data could also be valuable in shaping decisions in relation to the ongoing experimentation regarding a river contract and its scaling up to the whole river basin. ^{Footnote 96} Lastly, the results of the initiative could be useful for suggesting further investigations to be carried out by (citizen) scientists and by competent authorities.

Figure 3:

Interactive map of the geomorphological status of the Aniene (open access).