Researchers, city leaders, and community organizations have worked together to build one of the nation's largest urban air quality monitoring networks across Chicago. Now, a new public-facing website is making that wealth of information easier for residents to explore, understand, and use in their own neighborhoods.
Developed through a collaboration between the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Illinois Chicago, and community partners and residents across Chicagoland, Our Air Chicago transforms data collected from hundreds of air quality sensors into an interactive mapping platform that helps residents search by neighborhood, compare historical trends, overlay environmental justice data that highlights communities facing greater pollution burdens and vulnerability, and explore other neighborhood characteristics across Chicago—all to better understand the air they breathe.
The project builds on the sensor network developed through the work of Serap Erdal, a professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at UIC, and her team, while the Healthy Regions and Policies Lab at Illinois, directed by Marynia Kolak, led development of the public-facing dashboard.