1001 Smart Cities
🇪🇸 Barcelona

Citizen Air-Quality Sensing (Smart Citizen & xAire)

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below · 🔎 Last verified

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.

How this atlas is made · What “last verified” means · What “source-checked” means

Barcelona pioneered citizen air-quality sensing. Since 2012, FabLab Barcelona and IAAC's open-source Smart Citizen kits have streamed real-time particulate-matter, noise and temperature readings to a public platform — the city hosts one of the densest deployments and fed the EU Horizon 2020 iSCAPE trials (2016–2019), complementing the municipal Sentilo sensor network. In 2018 the xAire campaign had roughly 1,650 residents map NO2 at 725 points across all 10 districts — a peer-reviewed effort that out-sampled professional monitoring and exposed limit-exceeding hotspots.

Live 📅 since 2012
Outcome🎯 Succeeded
Evidence🔬 Peer-reviewedgrades the sourcing — this entry states no impact figure
what does this mean?The strongest source behind this entry is an independent peer-reviewed or academic study. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →
Run byFab Lab Barcelona / IAAC
Scale🏙️ City-wide
🌱 EnvironmentAir qualitySensors & IoTCitizen participationOpen data

Sources

↗ IAAC / Fab Lab Barcelona — Smart Citizen project pageSmart Citizen launched 2012 by Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC; open-source real-time low-cost environmental sensing; still operating
↗ Universitat de Barcelona OpenSystems — xAire project pagexAire citizen-science NO2 mapping, Nov 2017–Jun 2018, ~1,650 participants, 18 schools across 10 districts, 725 locations
↗ Perelló et al., 'Large-scale citizen science provides high-resolution nitrogen dioxide values', Science of the Total Environment (2021) — PMCPeer-reviewed: 1,650 citizens, 725 measurement locations, NO2 via Palmes samplers, exceedance of the 40 µg/m³ limit
↗ iSCAPE Sensors Documentation (Smart Citizen) — Citizen KitEU Horizon 2020 iSCAPE used the Smart Citizen Kit; Barcelona among deployment cities complementing Sentilo

Continue exploring

Compare this project

🇩🇪 luftdaten.info / Sensor.Community citizen air sensors · Stuttgart DIY citizen air sensing: Barcelona's Smart Citizen kits (2012) and Stuttgart's Luftdaten (2015) both went open-source and global. 🇵🇱 Anti-Smog Aggregated Air Surveillance · Krakow Both thickened thin official air monitoring: Barcelona crowd-mapped NO2 in xAire (2018); Krakow grew from 6 stations to ~100 sensors. 🇪🇸 Sentilo Open Sensor & Actuator Platform · Barcelona Barcelona sensed its air two ways: Sentilo's municipal network alongside residents' own open Smart Citizen kits.

Explore the wider context

📟 A Reading Is Not a Decision🌫️ Air quality guide🏙️ Barcelona city profile🌱 Environment projects📖 Air quality index (AQI)📖 Low-emission zone📖 Open data
📎 Cite this project

1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Citizen Air-Quality Sensing (Smart Citizen & xAire)” — Barcelona, Spain. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/barcelona-citizen-air-sensing/ (last verified 2026-07-25). Data: CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.

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