Promoting Healthy City through ICT technologies. An experience of Particulate Matter low-cost monitoring

The Pandemic emergency related to COVID-19 has renewed the interest in the Healthy City promotion and design. Ensuring a genuine life quality for all in healthier urban environments is a central issue in the contemporary architectural debate, as well as fundamental to achieve Sustainable Development Goals 11 and 3. In the urban context, both natural and anthropogenic factors drastically affect health and economy. Monitoring, simulating, assessing, and controlling such environmental factors is a prerequisite in promoting the Healthy City. In this perspective, ICT technologies and data processing offer new opportunities and tools to understand and manage complex and heterogeneous urban phenomena. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the effectiveness of low-cost ICT technologies in widespread air quality monitoring. To this, the Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 and 10 sensors developed by the research group is tested in a real world case-study. Results obtained from field monitoring campaigns in most relevant seasons, compared to data by the official meteorological municipal station, highlight benefits and barriers for developing a widespread urban monitoring infrastructure in a Healthy City site-specific design perspective.