Sniffing cities: Researcher uses ‘smell walks’ to map the world’s scents

University of Kent researcher Kate McLean-Mackenzie conducts “smell walks” in different cities.

According to her, during a scent walk, all information about the environment must pass through the nose. Participants are asked to concentrate on what they can feel both at a distance and up close.

While it may seem strange to some to deliberately sniff your way while walking through a city center, McLean-McKenzie believes places should be experienced through the nose as well as the eyes.

“You refocus your perception of the world,” McLean-Mackenzie said. How it happens guest presenter Paul Hunter. “It really changes the way you think about places. It makes you slow down and you kind of see places in a new light when you smell them.”

McLean-Mackenzie has spent the last 15 years analyzing and recording the smells of 40 cities around the world for her upcoming book. Atlas of aromas and smells.

What is a “scent landscape”?

McLean-McKenzie says she's mapping these “smellscapes” using data she and other participants collect on their scent walks in different locations around the world.

The scent landscape, she says, is “the olfactory equivalent of the visual landscape.”

“So if you think that when you actually look out, you can see everything that's in your field of vision, you can scan from left to right, you look beyond the horizon, you look down and you see everything that's in those perspectives. Smell is the same thing,” she said. “It’s something that comes to your mind nearby where you are.”

Have you ever wondered what Antarctica smells like? In the Maclean-Mackenzie atlas, it is the leathery smell 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 Kyiv, Ukraine, where she conducted her research nine years ago. At the time, she said, the town smelled of its own history: the pine forest in which it was built blended with the river and “moments of summer in the middle of winter,” marked by “strange bits of moss and green.”

Nearly four years after Russia invaded Ukraine, McLean-Mackenzie realizes that Kyiv probably smells very different now. That's why she says it's important to preserve these scent records.

“As times, places, industries change, smells will change too,” McLean-McKenzie said. “And I just think it’s great to have a record, both visual and verbal, of what these cities smelled like.”

The map also reflects the ephemeral nature of smells.

McLean-Mackenzie remembers walking through Montreal at 5:30 a.m. on a cold, wet morning. She recorded the “early smells” of trees, leaves on the ground, damp earth and coffee “that really filled” the air.

As the morning progressed and the group moved deeper into the city, these aromas gave way to more “traditional city smells”—warm notes of “coffee, bagels, food trucked in.”

More than just a scent

McLean-McKenzie says she knows scent is subjective and that not everyone on a scent walk will agree with the smells they pick up in a particular location. But when they agree, she says, that's when the real magic happens. happens.

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

McLean-McKenzie says that aside from the novelty of identifying and cataloging the heady bouquets of city life, the work also aims to capture how scents make people feel..

And that's what makes her smell, she says, 15 years later.

“The stories that come out of it are just magical,” she said. “Everyone has a scent story that they're very moved by, so there's an emotion attached to it, there's an idea of ​​special places, and there's a beautiful idea of ​​the complexity of the scent landscape, which means that no one place smells like just one thing.”

When asked to name her favorite scent, McLean-McKenzie didn't hesitate.

“The garden shed,” she said firmly. “Ahh, the inside of a garden shed is amazing. There's the lawnmower, there's the grass clippings, maybe a little creosote, there's the warmth of the asphalt on the roof and a little bit of the actual wood that the garden shed is made from.”