SMELLS LIKE SOMEWHERE
One of the most overlooked things about leaving a place is the smell of it. Long after people have memorized new streets or learned a new language, the scents of home can be the thing that lingers most vividly in memory. Whether it be street food drifting down a block, incense from a place of worship, or rain hitting warm pavement, smell is one of the quickest ways to unlock memories. Yet, it’s also one of the hardest senses to capture or document. We can photograph what we see and record what we hear, but scents are fleeting and difficult to preserve. Researchers call these sensory environments “smellscapes,” the layered mix of scents that shape how we experience and remember a place.
Designer and researcher Dr. Kate McLean has spent more than a decade mapping these smellscapes through “smell walks,” where participants move through cities and record what they smell, how strong it is, and what memories or associations it triggers. The resulting maps create a sensory portrait of urban life, showing how scents drift through neighborhoods and what they mean to the people who encounter them.
In cities shaped by migration, these smellscapes often reveal how culture travels quietly through everyday life: the sweetness of ripe fruit at a market stall, fresh laundry drying in the sun, cigarette smoke drifting from apartment balconies, or the heavy, all-consuming smell of pollution hanging in the air. Paying attention to smellscapes offers another way of noticing how communities recreate familiarity and memory in new places.
Explore the Sensory Maps project to see how smellscapes are being mapped around the world.
For more RECS like this one, check out the rest of vol. 005:
