Abstract

This chapter investigates the role of Environmental Citizenship within the twenty-first-century societal issues of human activities - urban development, transport systems, tourism, and cultural heritage. The first part of the chapter analyses the relationship between Environmental Citizenship, urban development, and cultural landscapes. Cities are home to the majority of the world’s population and are responsible for most of the resource consumption and waste production, which places them in the focus of Environmental Citizenship discourses. The issues of urbanisation and Environmental Citizenship are followed by issues of sustainable transport that, among others, have a goal of reducing transport disadvantage of marginalized social groups. Cultural heritage is identified as a new fourth pillar of sustainable development (along with environment, economy and society), and its role in Environmental Citizenship is explored. Sustainable tourism is reviewed using new approaches that have adopted elements of Environmental Citizenship and were introduced as a reaction to unsustainable mass tourism. Finally, the chapter presents certain practices of Environmental Citizenship within the investigated fields of expertise that could be promoted and implemented elsewhere. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

In this paper we present a low-cost infrastructure to collect a variety of location-based multi-sourced data with the aim of providing personalized services and raising awareness for sustainable mobility solutions. The gathered data can be used to provide: (i) citizens and tourists with personalized location-based services to increase sustainability awareness; (ii) local authorities and tourism boards with a tool to identify and prevent mobility issues; and (iii) transport companies with an instrument to support urban mobility planning decisions. To collect data, we exploited a low-cost Wi-Fi passive tracking system and we augmented this infrastructure using sensors for detecting environmental conditions. To achieve this, we provided 60 points of interest and 20 buses with our solution, to spread out the sensors over the entire Madeira Island. Using the gathered data, we developed different scenarios to prove that in a world where sensing data is becoming inexpensive, there are opportunities to use our approach to deliver data back to the citizens, empowering local communities, with the goal of promoting sustainable mobility and tourism.

Abstract