Taxonomy of Environmental Sensing in Smart Cities

This text analyses the impact of six sensing devices derived from smart cities and internet of things and suggests they are creating novel environmental practices. These practices depart radically from the commonly held epistemological paradigm that environmental data leads to environmental knowledge. Instead the paper outlines a variety of surprising practices that these devices enable. These findings suggest a need to reconsider the rhetoric used to describe these devices and an urgency for further ethnographic research on the practices and ethics of environmental sensing in smart cities.