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.”

Read the full article in the December 8th article by Vittoria Traverso on Atlas Obscura...

A smellmap of Amsterdam by English artist and researcher Kate McLean. Kate McLean.