shared questions

These are questions that we should ask for each city we are working on. Some are just basic background (the vehicle mix or air regulation history in a particular city, for example); others (focused on parks or parking lots, for example) are are less straightforwardly necessary to answer, but have potential to help us understand the lived experience and style of particular cities. Here are some good resources for shared questions.

Most of these shared questions should contribute to some kind of shared finding -- and then become a TAF file. New findings will also provide content for the newsletter associated with the project (which we promise in the NSF).

Shared questions are also a good way to orient student research (and our field schools); this approach worked well with a group of about 20 undergraduates at RPI fall 2015. Note that one way to answer these questions is through interviews.

In the PECE platform, I think that the list below would become one ever-growing structured analytic. Individual questions may also call for their own structured analytic. Some questions will call for a group dedicated to working on it.

All are welcome to add shared questions.

• What air pollution visualizations have been created for each city, and how have they circulated and motivated action?

• How has poverty and vulnerability in each city shifted shape over the last few decades? (through the suburbanization of poverty, for example)?

• What innovations in bus transport have been undertaken in each city over the last few decades?

• How do housing and patterns of residential living contribute to (or undermine) environmental public health in each city? (Studies of near-roadway pollution are relevant here, for example)?

• What innovations in housing and the residential sector have been undertaken in each city over the last few decades?

• How have parks in the city been conceived, designed, used, and transformed, and what does this tell us about both city governance and the way the city is lived in by different kinds of inhabitants?

• How are parking lots inhabited, perceived and drivers of city dynamics?

• What is the vehicle and fuel mix (including freight traffic, ship traffic, and, if possible, construction vehicles) in each city, and what standards and rules regulate emissions and vehicle activity? See this recent coverage of problems with diesel powered vehicles in Europe.

• What genes, media forms and venues enable critical commentary (about environmental issues, but also more generally)? In Singapore, for example, there is an emerging critical theater movement ?

• How is whistleblowing enabled, repressed and responded to in each city?

• Maps of air quality monitors?

• Long term urban planning and transportation plans?

• What data sets on air quality and human health have been collected for this city, and how accessible, and usable are they?

• What factors contribute to (and undermine) respiratory public health in each city?

• Who produces and takes care of asthma data sets in the city?

• What K-12 school-based asthma initiatives have been undertaken in each city?

• Public transportation capacity? Vehicle mix and fuel mix? Transportation innovations?

• Timeline of urban regulations, compliance history, and mitigation efforts (i.e. when did the Clean Air Act get translated into particular initiatives in Houston? When were they out of compliance?

• GHG inventories?

• What climate change planning has occurred at this city scale? How have public health concerns motivated this?

• List of air quality advocacy organizations and individuals?

• Historical development and character of city leadership?

• What flash points tell us something about how the city works?

• Where does data mix with propaganda? (eg When/where have there been claims that air pollution and related health data has been (perhaps purposefully) misrepresented? Note that this is relevant to a thread we follow in K-12 EcoEd outreach focused on how air pollution data can lie -- as a way to teach a mix of scientific and media literacy.