"This involves asking participants to take smell walks on the street recording not only what they can smell but its intensity and duration, whether it is unexpected, whether they like it or not, and any associations the scent conjures up. I analyse that data and from it create visual maps and then a sort of cultural narrative about what smell tells you about those cities in response to what came out from the smell walks,"
"I realised that there was an enormous gap in the fact that we communicate what we see and we can record that and we can share it via Instagram and photography and sketching and we can record and share sounds digitally. But any way of recording and communicating smell was largely missing, she said. As a result, McLean-MacKenzie began mapping smellscapes in different locations, including many of the world's cities."
An atlas captures urban smellscapes by compiling observations from organised smell walks in which participants note scents, intensity, duration, surprise, liking, and associative memories. The collected data are analysed to produce visual maps and cultural narratives that reveal how smells shape experiences and stories in cities. The project covers 40 locations, including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Canterbury, Amsterdam, Verona, Kyiv, Kolkata and Paris. The approach emphasises human interpretation and subjectivity while recent research underlines robust human olfactory discrimination, showing people can distinguish smells separated by only tens of milliseconds.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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