Learning About Cities by Mapping Their Smells

EACH OF US PROBABLY HAS one: a scent that, as soon as we step out of a car, bus, or train, immediately reminds us that we have made it back home. But what happens when that smell isn’t there anymore? How would you describe it to people that never had any experience of it?

English artist Kate McLean has been trying to address these and other questions for the past seven years with her Sensory Maps project. In 2010, she began looking for ways to map landscapes based on sensory input. The first of these maps related to smell. “I collected comments about smell from people in different parts of Edinburgh,” she says, “and transformed that into a visualization that had this amazing link to the environment, as smell often has to do with conditions like wind direction, rain, or changes in temperature.”

McLean calls such a visualization a “smellmap.” Smellmaps can come in handy for people interested in new ways of exploring both the cities they live in and the ones they visit. So far, McLean has led small armies of urban explorers on “smellwalks” around 12 other cities, including New York, Singapore, Barcelona, and Kiev. Participants are provided with a smell visualization kit, replete with scoring cards and colored pens, that helps them log odors as they walk. After cataloging each scent, the smellwalkers also evaluate some of its attributes, such as intensity, pleasantness, and familiarity. They then mark their findings on white canvasses, which McLean later turns into beautiful visualizations. 

A smellmap, made up of colored spots and concentric lines that look like galaxies, is a visual synthesis of the different experiences reported by smellwalkers, explains McLean. “It’s very unlikely that two people standing in the same place would smell the same exact scent,” she says. “So rather than seeking precise definitions and classifications, the way classic scientific cartography does, I am interested in negotiating different perceptions.”

Learn more at Atlas Obscura