Smell and the City: How Does Smell Factor into Good Urban Design?
We see the city, we hear the city, but, above all, we smell the city. In a landmark new book, Dr. Victoria Henshaw, Lecturer in Urban Design and Planning at the University of Sheffield, UK, discusses the use of smell in good urban design. Urban Smellscapes: Understanding and Designing City Smell Environments, published by Routledge/Taylor & Francis, is an historical and practical guide to designing smell environments in the city.
Scent has unique qualities: ubiquity, persistence, and an unparalleled connection to memory, yet it has gone overlooked in discussions of sensory design. What scents shape the city? How does scent contribute to placemaking? How do we design smell environments in the city?
The broader consideration of smell in the design, management and perception of cities is an important issue across the urban design disciplines, but also has implications for other disciplines such as public health, city marketing and tourism. In addition, the smellscapes of towns and cities have changed significantly in the past 100 years, especially with air pollutants having a significant impact upon our experiences in a range of different ways.
According to Dr. Henshaw, “Smell is a factor that has sadly been overlooked in the design and management of cities for such a long time but it has an incredibly important role in our experiences of cities and the way we think about them. In Urban Smellscapes I really hope to encourage urban designers, architects and planners to think about odor in a new way, and to consider the opportunities and challenges that are presented in exploring important smells in the environment.”
Urban Smellscapes makes a notable impact on the growing body of literature on the senses and design, contributing towards the wider research agenda regarding how people sensually experience urban environments. With case studies from factories, breweries and urban parks, this new book identifies processes by which urban smell environments are managed and controlled, and gives designers and city managers tools to actively use smell in their work.
In addition to her research, Dr. Henshaw carries out “smellwalks” in cities to help people better understand the world around them by deciphering the smells that surround them. As she does so, she finds out more about what odors people associate with and detect in a particular city, and how this influences their enjoyment of the local environment.
“When I carry out smellwalks with people, it is amazing the variety and locations of smells we detect and people have such fantastic stories to tell about their memories of particular areas and experiences which were accompanied by a specific smell.”
She has run these smellwalks across the UK and in cities in Europe and the United States and will be running some upcoming walks in Canada in January 2014. For further details of these upcoming smellwalks and her work on the relationships between smell and the city, you can visit her blog: http://smellandthecity.wordpress.com/
For additional information about Urban Smellscapes, visit http://www.routledge.com/u/UrbanSmellscapes/ or contact Chris Hardin, Senior Marketing Manager.
Christopher Hardin
Senior Marketing Manager
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
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christopher.hardin@taylorandfrancis.com
Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences. Founded in 1836, we have published many of greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Einstein, Russell, Popper, Wittgenstein, Jung, Bohm, Hayek, McLuhan, Marcuse and Sartre. Today we publish some 600 journals and around 2,000 new books each year, from offices all over the world. Our current publishing program encompasses the liveliest texts, and the best in research. Our books backlist has over 35,000 titles in print. We take pride in the range and strength of the backlist and we use the latest technology to promote it using a wide range of formats, both in print and online.
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