SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The growing field of sensory urbanism is changing the way we assess neighborhoods and projects:
When David Howes thinks of his home city of Montreal, he thinks of the harmonious tones of carillon bells and the smell of bagels being cooked over wood fires. But when he stopped in at his local tourism office to ask where they recommend that visitors go to smell, taste, and listen to the city, he just received blank stares.
"They only know about things to see, not about the city's other sensory attractions, its soundmarks and smellmarks," says Howes, the author of the forthcoming book The Sensory Studies Manifesto and director of Concordia University's Centre for Sensory Studies, a hub for the growing field often referred to as "sensory urbanism."
Around the world, researchers like Howes are investigating how nonvisual information defines the character of a city and affects its livability. Using methods ranging from low-tech sound walks and smell maps to data scraping, wearables, and virtual reality, they're fighting what they see as a limiting visual bias in urban planning.
[...] The best way to determine how people react to different sensory environments is a subject of some debate within the field. Howes and his colleagues are taking a more ethnographic approach, using observation and interviews to develop a set of best practices for good sensory design in public spaces. Other researchers are going more high-tech, using wearables to track biometric data like heart-rate variability as a proxy for emotional responses to different sensory experiences. The EU-funded GoGreenRoutes project is looking to that approach as it studies how nature can be integrated into urban spaces in a way that improves both human and environmental health.
[...] "Sensory perceptions are not neutral, or simply biological; whether we find something pleasant or not has been shaped culturally and socially," says Monica Montserrat Degen, an urban cultural sociologist at Brunel University London. Civic planners in both London and Barcelona are using her research on public-space perceptions and how "sensory hierarchies," as she refers to them, include or exclude different groups of people.
Degen cites the example of a London neighborhood where inexpensive eateries that served as hangouts for local youth were displaced by trendy cafes. "It used to smell like fried chicken," she says, but newer residents found that aroma off-putting rather than welcoming. "Now it smells like cappuccinos."
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 19 2022, @08:58PM
Fertilizing the fields doesn't happen all the time. But the subway always smells like ass (or sweat, urine or just people). But as with most things I guess you eventually get used to it.
It's not that rural smells are somehow more pleasant all the time, it's just better most of the time. That said there are very different rural smells to, inland or coastal, if there is a lot of farmland etc. But large cities always smell bad. If you can't smell it you have been there for to long. I guess if there is a heavy rain there are a few moment of freshness until you are hit by the smell of wet garbage and humid people.