Reporting with Sensors in Urban Spaces
The stories sensors in smart cities tell about our urban lives
There is Hamburg’s city centre, white and shiny; there’s Berlin Kreuzberg, somewhere between hipster and ratty, drenched in colour; there are the greedy, overbearing banking towers of Frankfurt; and there is the quietness of the English Garden in Munich: Cities are great protagonists.
The cities we live in are hard to grasp for journalists. They are dynamic entities, oceans of life that reporters dive into and are carried away by. They are contradictory and incoherent. It is difficult to understand the bigger picture from the reporters’ perspectives of flaneurs at street level. The matter is complicated even further by a mixture of private and public ground, transparent and hidden spaces. It is possible to break down some data, such as electoral behavior, all the way down to the street people live in. What about other kinds of data, though, water consumption for example, or behavior in traffic? How can live data influence our view on these things? What can networked cars and buses tell us, or all smartphone sensors combined? Can we aggregate smartphone data and transform it into stories about the private spaces of the city? What kinds of stories are hidden in data about sewage and lines in the supermarket, traffic jams, the filling level of garbage cans and orders in cafés, the routes of delivery services and mailpersons? They all have their own stories to tell about a city’s rhythm. The Internet of Things (IoT) collects many of these kinds of data. If we untangle the layers of data that cover our cities, we can read it in new and unexpected ways.
The Spanish city Santander has proven that just like apartments can be made ‘smart’ by sensors, so can cities. Santander is the most networked city of Europe with more than 12,000 sensors and has become the destination of countless delegations from all over the world. The sensors help to organize the parking spots across town as if they were one big parking garage, they supervise consumption of water and energy, they make sure waste is collected and public parks are watered. The city with its 175,000 inhabitants is one giant lab and could serve as inspiration for more than one innovative journalistic story. However, it is not all that easy to first of all find a story in a heterogenous mass of data and then narrate straightforwardly, without making it too complex. Some pioneering cities, for example the “Sensing City” of Christchurch, New Zealand, or Chicago’s “Array of Things”, share the smart city data with its citizens. Others, as media researchers Ethan Zuckerman and Catherine D‘Ignazio have pointed out, turn their citizens into unpaid data-collectors to the city’s advantage.
On the level of data, we can truly understand the city. The fight for space on the streets between car drivers and cyclists is not an individual one — but how can we make it visible beyond the number of accidents? Where in the city do we meet friends and acquaintances? And where do we interact with strangers?
Every city has its unique sound. The distribution of noise is another data set that can map the city. Where are its loud, bustling hubbubs, where the quiet, snug corners and havens of silence? A noise map can make all of that visible.
Finally, there are a community’s commodities. In the South of the United States, for example, water is a scarce resource — like in many other places around the world. Sensor data could unveil who is wasting the treasured good. When it comes to Smart City Reporting, a Journalism of Things approach can make all its strengths count.
Urban spaces offer camouflage
Most of the time, it is entirely unproblematic to place sensors in urban space. The mobile network is generally good, there are many secluded corners and poles, even access to electricity is no impossibility. Beyond the urban infrastructure, another plus is the audience’s general interest in these topics. A well-done piece based on live data can offer entirely new perspectives in a local news landscape that is otherwise dominated by monotony and overbearing routine. It can narrate the space we all inhabit in new and unexpected ways.
Journalists literally tread on and walk past ideas for this kind of reporting every day. In many German cities, the Open Knowledge Foundation has helped to establish Code for Germany Labs, inspired by the American equivalent. In these labs, coders meet and realize projects that encourage civic participation. They are looking for better solutions for the local public transport in Magdeburg and for smarter parking solutions in Dresden, they collect transparent data for local politics in Munich or create a program that polls citizens’ opinions on urban planning in Wuppertal. Journalists have so far only infrequently tapped into the resources and possibilities that these labs offer to understand cities through their data. That is surprising insofar as that the Code for Germany Labs supply one of the scarcest of all resources: coders.
In the following, I want to outline three projects in more detail because they are prototypical for the Journalism of Things in urban spaces, one from Berlin (“Radmesser”, wants to make cyclists more visible in the city’s traffic), one from Stuttgart (“Feinstaubradar”, collects data about particular matter) and one from Los Angeles (“The Wet Princes of Bel Air”, uncovering wasteful water pumping).
Most bicycle accidents are caused by cars that pass cyclists with too little space between them, by vans that turn off unexpectedly, by road works that block bike lanes or by cyclists who overtake traffic jammed cars on the right side. Many in Berlin do not feel safe navigating the city’s traffic by bike, which is, the initiators of the project claim, why people opt out of riding their bikes through the city altogether. Hendrik Lehmann, reporter for „Tagesspiegel“, says: “Our number one goal is to find out how often and where cars do not keep a safe distance to cyclists. Does the data differ by district, or by the amount of traffic, or the time of day we are looking at? And which role do the cyclists themselves play?”
There are no available studies that could answer these questions. Therefore, the team collected the necessary data themselves and then turned it into comprehensible journalistic content. They attached sensors — which they planned, brazed and put together themselves — to the bike frames of 100 cycling readers of their newspaper. The sensors measured the distance to passing cars. Lehmann says: “We had underestimated how difficult it is to actually build the sensors — but on the other hand, we learned a lot about gluing and drilling things, and about whole code libraries the existence of which we had been oblivious before.”
The project deals with a comparably small everyday problem, in combination with a lesser-known regulation concerning the distance cars have to keep when passing bicycles in traffic. With two physicists (Michael Gegg and David Meidinger) and one journalist (Henrik Lehmann), the team combined many competences. Their project filled a vacuum because no one had managed to get to the bottom of the problem at hand before, let alone turn it into convincing journalistic content. Gegg says: “We thought that approaching the topic with the tools of data journalism could get us the best results. We reached a broad audience, and we can look at the issue impartially and critically from many different perspectives.”
“The cyclists swarmed out into all [twelve] districts of the city. By November 11, they had cycled a total distance of 13,300 kilometers. On average, each of them had been on the road for 130 kilometers through Berlin. In total, the bikes were passed 16,700 times by cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles and scooters. Overtaking with distances of less than 1.5 meters between the bicycle and the passing vehicle was rated as ‘narrow’, which applied to 9402 of the recorded passing maneuvers. That means that considerably more than every second driver passing did not keep a safe distance. 3019 times, the distance was even less than one meter and 192 drivers passed with a distance of less than 50 centimeters.” — Der Tagesspiegel on Radmesser
The project has earned the team the 2018 “Reporterpreis” (an important journalistic award in Germany) in the category ‘data journalism’. The sensor attached to the bike frame is a modified parking sensor. The cost of the sensor’s the components adds up to less than 25 euros. The sensor sends ultrasounds to the left and the right roughly twenty times per second, with two sensors on the left side establishing whether the car is passing the bike, or vice versa. A small Arduino Nano microcontroller operates the monitoring. The project team does not rely on the measurements of distance between bike and vehicle alone. The sensor box is connected to the cyclist’s smartphone via Bluetooth, with the phone attached to the handlebar. Whenever the cyclist is passed by a vehicle on the left side, the phone automatically snaps a picture. Combining the sensors’ ultrasound monitoring and the photo later on, an algorithm calculates what kind of vehicle has passed the cyclist with how much space between them. Glegg says: “The image recognition allows us to determine whether it was indeed a car that passed the bicycle, or another bike, or a bus or something completely irrelevant like a pigeon for example.” This is how AI can turn a very simple sensor box into a very strong journalistic tool.
On top of that, the graphic editing of the project is very convincing. It combines fancy looks and usability, which makes it easy to navigate the story. Instead of focusing on the data, the story is narrated very graphically. It is told in chapters that each work on their own as well, with an animation explaining the project’s first test ride. Overall, this is a journalistic lighthouse for telling stories about mobility in the future.
A health threat is in the air
“How dramatic is the invisible pollution of Stuttgart really — and which health threats are in the air of the city?” That was the teaser for a project called “Feinstaubradar” (which translates to “Particular Matter Radar”) that was realized by a local news outlet, “Stuttgarter Zeitung”. The team combined modern technology and sensor journalism, making their journalistic competence count in a politically charged field. One particular crossroads in the city of Stuttgart, Neckartor, had come to unflattering fame as “the dirtiest junction of Germany” due to the high levels of particulate matter (PM10) in the air.
Big cities’ lungs are coughing up soot particles. PM10 levels have been above legal limits for years. Is that exclusive to that one spot? In a joint effort with the city’s Open Knowledge Lab and luftdaten.info, the news outlet managed to motivate their readers to build 750 PM10 sensors and deliver the data they collected to the news room. In a city that has long been the home of car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz and Porsche, arguments about driving bans for certain vehicles become especially heated.
“We had the idea to collector our own data for the story during a hackathon in Munich,” says Jan Georg Plavec, editor at the newspaper. “The crucial modification we implemented was that we went for the overall view of the matter rather than rely on selective monitoring spots.” Together with coder Christian Fremmeld and designer Oliver Biwer, they constructed a system that connected to the news room’s CMS.
The PM Radar evaluates the data in a twofold manner: Firstly, a live map displays, with the help of different colors, which parts of the cities are suffering from heightened PM10 levels at that moment. Secondly, automatically generated texts by third-party provider AX semantics deliver PM10 reports for all city districts and the surrounding communities. Plavec says: “We wanted to do something else than all the other news rooms had done before, hence the automatically generated text.” The project was met with great interest by the newspaper’s readers.
In 2018, the PM Radar won a price for excellent community journalism, awarded by the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation. The jury wrote: “The editorial team uses modern technology and data journalistic tools to make their journalistic competence count with regards to a politically charged topic — this is big data on a local level.”
Nothing is closer to heart than the air we breath
The idea of polluted air is one a favorite in sensor journalism, or at least one of those topics that result in projects very frequently. A project that got a lot of attention was #breathe in India. Commercially distributed devices that monitor air pollution were put up in 15 Indian cities. The project was initiated by the non-profit data collecting organization IndiaSpend and Twitter India. The devices generated tweets with the hashtag #breathe from their respective locations. The IndiaSpend website displayed a map with up-to-date as well as historic measurements.
MIT’s Senseable City Lab developed a project called “Clean Air Nairobi”. The Romanian local newspaper “Gazeta de Sud” planned a project called “HowYouBreathe”, which, however, apparently ran out of funding. Another MIT Senseable City Lab project was called “One Country — Two Lungs” and attempted to compare two citizens of Hongkong and Shenzen in an interesting case study. The experiment shows that personalization works. The project, by the way, used garbage trucks equipped with different sensors, to collect data from around the city.
Sensor journalism does not always have to be electric. Southwest German broadcasting station SWR based its project #Abgasalarm (which translates to #exhaustgasalarm) on data from chemical sensors. A nationwide scandal around diesel had brought the pollutant nitrogen dioxide (NO2) to attention — diesel cars are the main polluter when it comes to NO2. The measuring tubes used by thee SWR project are cheap and easy to put in place. 200 of these tubes were distributed to listeners who put them up for a week. The collected data was visualized in a map, resulting in the realization that polluted air can be found in big cities and rural areas alike. In total, the pollution limits were exceeded in 21 locations. The broadcaster writes: “The highest amount of pollution was measured in Wiesloch. The small town’s 63,4 µg/m³ air displays an extent of pollution on the same level as that in big cities like Cologne or Hamburg.”
TIP: You can actually monitor quite easily if the air pollution exceeds the legal limit at your place or residence and employment. The Swiss manufacturer Passam offers a whole package, that already includes the evaluation of your findings for 40 euros.
It makes sense to include citizens in sensor-driven projects and attempts at doing so are generally, and maybe surprisingly, met with much interest. Joint monitoring can even have beneficial effects for communities. “Monitoring builds community solidarity and helps citizens determine whether to take action as citizens to demand a corporate or government cleanup or other actions to mitigate environmental harm,” write Catherine D’Ignazio and Ethan Zuckerman. Streetbump, a project initiated by Boston’s city administration, uses car drivers to locate potholes. The app the drivers install uses two sensors of their smartphones to find potholes in the streets of Boston, one that measures acceleration to identify bumpy roads and the GPS sensor to locate them.
Identifying water wastefulness from space
The scarcity of water is a big problem in California. In the summer of 2016, Los Angeles was suffering from a severe drought. Not all areas, however, seemed to run out of water. In the gardens of Bel Air, the city district of the rich and super-rich, fountains and swimming pools had no apparent water shortage. One household in Bel Air uses up amounts of water that could elsewhere suffice for 90 families: One property owner in Bel Air pumps 11.8 million gallons (roughly 45,000 m³) into his gardens. The average Californian family needs 132,000 gallons (roughly 499 m³) a year.
The city, however, did not want to disclose any information about who was wasting so much water to the journalistic team of Reveal, a center for investigative reporting. The water use, however wasteful, was legal: Anyone can pump as much water as they pay for. So the journalists began to think about other ways to uncover the “Wet Princes (and Princesses) of Bel Air”.
They had an idea. Water has a visible effect, especially during a drought: It can turn a dried-out garden into a green oasis. The investigators therefore combined satellite images with color sensors. They used the “Normalized Difference Vegetation Index“, an algorithm that had originally been developed to track drought and deforestation on satellite images, to determine how green any given piece of L.A. land (still) was. To be extra-sure they were not making any mistakes, the journalists additionally multispectral images to generate estimates regarding the humidity of the ground. Using these algorithms, they estimated the amount of water needed on each property.
“Yes, it takes almost 550,000 gallons of water in L.A. to keep a half-acre lawn healthy each year. And that’s assuming that your irrigation system is 100 percent efficient, which it never is.” – How we found the Wet Prince of Bel Air
The reporters of this story used scientific inventory in new and innovative ways to reach their journalistic goal. They confronted all owners with their findings. Not all of them replied. Those who did confirmed the investigators’ research. Members of the “water-pumping royalty” were, amongst others: Jerrold Perenchio, producer of the Hollywood blockbuster Blade Runner, an investment banker, a soap producer and a Wal-Mart-heiress. Reveal’s Micheal Corey writes:
“Did we get it right? Only one person so far has told us his actual water use. We estimated that Robert Daly, a former chairman of Warner Bros. and former CEO of the Dodgers, was using between 2.1 million and 4.2 million gallons a year. He told Lance [Williams] he was billed for about 4 million gallons.” — How we found the Wet Prince of Bel Air
The search for the Wet Princes of Bel Air may well be one of the craziest examples of sensor journalism. As with the PM Radar and the cyclists of Berlin, it all began with an everyday problem that ordinary journalism could not handle adequately. The colleagues who pushed these projects therefore dared to explore new realms, with new equipment and tools that they had to build themselves. They trusted prototypes and makeshift solutions. And they gained new perspectives on a city that they had thought they knew inside out.
