Sniffing cities: Researchers use ‘smell walk’ to map world’s smells

Researcher Kate McLean-McKenzie from the University of Kent leads “smell walks” in different cities.

On a smell walk, she says, all the information about your environment has to come through your nose. Participants are invited to focus on what they can smell from a distance and up close.

While it may seem strange to some people – deliberately sniffing your way during a city walk – McLean-McKenzie believes that places should be experienced not only with our eyes, but also with our noses.

“You refocus on how you experience the world,” McLean-McKenzie explains. as it happens Guest host, Paul Hunter. “It changes the way you think about places. It makes you slow down and when you smell places you see them in a new light.”

McLean-McKenzie has spent the last 15 years analyzing and recording the smells of 40 towns and cities around the world for her upcoming book, Atlas of Fragrances and Fragrances.

What is ‘smellscape’?

McLean-McKenzie says she maps these “smell landscapes” using data she and other participants gather from smell walks in different locations around the world.

A smellscape, she describes, is “the olfactory counterpart of a visual landscape.”

“So, if you think about when you’re actually looking out, you can see everything that’s in your immediate sight line, you can scan left to right, you can look at the horizon line, you can look down and you can see whatever is out there in those landscapes. The smellscape is a similar thing,” she said. “It’s what comes into your nose in your immediate vicinity.”

Have you ever wondered what Antarctica smells like? In Maclean-Mackenzie’s atlas, it is the leathery touch of a dead seal mixed with the smell of heavy machinery used at the Rothera Research Station where the data was collected.

Then there’s Kiev, Ukraine, where he conducted his research nine years ago. At the time, she says, the town smelled of its history – the pine forest in which it was built blended with the river and the “moments of summer in the middle of winter” were marked by “moss and the odd patch of greenery”.

Nearly four years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, McLean-McKenzie knows Kiev may smell very different now. That’s why preserving these scent records matters, she says.

“As times change, as places change, as industries change, so will the scent landscape,” McLean-McKenzie said. “And I think it’s a great thing to have a record, both visually and in words, of what those cities smelled like.”

The map also shows the transient nature of smell.

Maclean-McKenzie remembers a smelly walk through Montreal at 5:30 a.m. on a cold and wet morning. He recorded the trees, leaves on the ground, damp earth and the “initial smell” of coffee, which “really punctuated” the air.

As the morning progressed and the group moved deeper into the city, those scents gave way to more “traditional urban smells” – warm notes of “coffee, bagels, food coming from different places.”

more than just scent

McLean-McKenzie says she knows smell is subjective and not every person on a smell walk will agree with what they smell in a certain location. But when they agree, she says, that’s when the real magic happens. Happens.

“When someone says, ‘I smelled this,’ and then someone says, ‘Oh, I did too,’ then you start to see this amazing connection and how we often smell very similar things,” she said.

Beyond the novelty of identifying and cataloging the heady bouquets of urban life, McLean-McKenzie says the work also aims to capture how scents make people feel,

She says, this is what keeps her going even after 15 years.

“The stories that come from it are absolutely magical,” he said. “Everyone has a story of smell that is very poignant to them and so there is a feeling associated with it and there is this idea of ​​special places and this beautiful idea about the complexity of an odor landscape meaning that no place smells the same thing.”

Asked to name her favorite scent, McLean-McKenzie didn’t hesitate.

“The garden shed,” she said firmly. “Ah, the inside of the garden shed, it’s wonderful. It’s the lawn mower, it mows the grass, it’s probably a little creosote, it’s the heat of the asphalt on the roof and a little bit of the wood that the garden shed is made of.”