Mobile crowd-sensing as a resource for contextualized urban public policies: a study using three use cases on noise and soundscape monitoring

Abstract

Environmental noise is a major pollutant in contemporary cities and calls for the active monitoring of noise levels to spot the locations where it most affects the people’s health and well-being. However, due to the complex relationship between environmental noise and its perception by the citizens, it is not sufficient to quantitatively measure environmental noise. We need to collect and aggregate contextualized – both quantitative and qualitative – data about the urban environmental noise so as to be able to study the objective and subjective relationships between sound and living beings. This complex knowledge is a prerequisite for making efficient territorial public policies for soundscapes that are inclined towards living beings welfare. In this paper, we investigate how Mobile Phone Sensing – aka crowd-sensing – enables the gathering of such knowledge, provided the implementation of sensing protocols that are customized according to the context of use and the intended exploitation of the data. Through three case studies that we carried out in France and Finland, we show that MPS is not solely a tool that contributes to sensitizing citizens and decision-makers about noise pollution; it also contributes to increasing our knowledge about the impact of the environmental noise on people’s health and well-being in relation to its physical and subjective perception.