Rémi Digonnet
Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Étienne
Abstract: This article aims to elaborate a visual mapping of the senses in an urban environment. The definition of a sensory urban landscape will rely on the perception of urban ‘commons’ according to different variables such as source, effect, intensity, and familiarity. Such varied perceptions question both the geographical limits of the senses and their categorisations. The representation of a sensory urban landscape finds its illustration here with an attempt to visualise a ‘smellscape’ of Saint-Étienne through the combination of olfactory nodes and paths.
Résumé : Cet article vise l’élaboration d’une cartographie sensorielle urbaine. La définition d’un paysage sensoriel urbain repose sur la perception sensible des communs de la ville selon diverses variables telles que la source, l’effet, l’intensité et la familiarité. De telles perceptions interrogent à la fois la limite géographique sensorielle et la catégorisation des sens. La représentation d’un paysage urbain sensible trouve ici son illustration à travers une tentative de visualisation d’un paysage olfactif de la ville de Saint-Étienne grâce à l’articulation de nœuds et de chemins odorants.
1. Introduction
Though the ‘commons’ of the city, i.e. public space, has often been studied through the prism of human interaction, whether the perspective be historical (Vanuxem, 2018), sociological (Maximy, 2000) or philosophical (Paquot, Lussault, Younès, 2007), the present study brings to the fore the novel1 dimension of a sensory perception of urban space (Bailly, 2018). Viewed as a medium between the world and the self, sensation is vital for connecting the surrounding environment to the human self. The sensory focus should call into question the often distancing perception of urban public space and thereby reinforce inhabitants’ sensory experience of a city. To do so, the sensory perception of public space in the city of Saint-Étienne2 proceeds in two steps: firstly, practical and physical perception by means of an olfactory perambulation in the city, secondly, a more abstract and mental representation through an olfactory mapping of the city. The underlying issue at work is to question both the perception and the representation of olfactory urban public space. The attempt to visualise an olfactory urban landscape depends, firstly, on the definition and the description of an olfactory urbanscape and, secondly, on the cognitive categorisation of odours. The representation of the olfactory commons has three components: description, categorisation, and visualisation. The survey created and used for this study follows this pattern with a questionnaire aimed at defining the olfactory perception of the city thanks to the description of an urbanscape; a theoretical approach to the categorisation of odours; and the performing of ‘smellwalks’ (i.e. olfactory perambulations) to eventually achieve an olfactory visualisation of the urban commons.
2. Olfactory urbanscapes
2.1. From ‘property commons’ to ‘sensory commons’
According to Oxford Dictionaries, the ‘commons’ can be defined as i) the common people regarded as a part of a political system, especially in Britain (e.g. ‘the House of Commons’), ii) land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community (e.g. ‘the mismanagement of a commons’). Common property is hence defined as a shared entity, material or immaterial, which benefits everyone. Natural resources, exemplified by the four elements (air, water, fire, earth) are primary illustrations of the existence of a gradient in common property. Air, as a natural resource shared by all humans, has not yet been limited or fixed by quotas. Despite a growing limitation in supply, water remains a common resource access to which is guaranteed by human rights. From the cave to the hearth, the common resource of fire has allowed humans to fight against dark and cold. From common property to private property, ‘land’ has become a ‘territory’3, losing its commonality even if some common grounds are still guaranteed today, from the recognised ‘national park’ to the so-called ‘communal lot’. If humans have managed to profit from environmental common resources with varying degrees of success, they have also succeeded in sharing their own constructions and artefacts, whether material (collective machines) or immaterial (shared artificial intelligence). The sharing of common properties (mise en commun) aimed at the collective good is a reality, however its modus operandi (mise au commun) remains variable, depending on whether the common goods are individually or collectively designed. Public space is defined by both an altruistic and communal functioning, when a common and shared decision allows goods or services to be exploited for common benefit. Many life experiences emerged from a common undertaking, on the scale of a territory (Ancient Rome), a movement (Flower Power from the 60s), or even on the scale of a lot (typical workers’ gardens from the end of the 20th century). Many have tried to formalise a common organisation in various domains of society: in industry (Lip’s self-governed firm), in architecture (Godin’s Familistère or Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation), or even in politics via the labelling of a political movement (‘Communism’). Does the common administration of a common property demand a common space? At the time of property dematerialisation (internet data, artificial intelligence, etc.) it seems that the physical common location (e.g. post office) tends to disappear, while symbolic common locations (e.g. website) proliferate. However, it could also be said that the general tendency for dematerialisation of the common goods paradoxically brings new places which claim the legacy of the commons into existence as can be illustrated by various domains, such as food (shared gardens), business (collective selling points), work (co-working offices), or even transport (car-sharing). Common locations are also the site of shared sensory experiences, either voluntarily or involuntarily experienced. Different venues can illustrate shared sensory experiences, such as the market (olfaction), the restaurant (taste), the concert venue (hearing), the cinema (visual), etc. Often common places are a shelter for sensations, both an awakening of the senses and a return to the senses. Yet such sensory public spaces can sometimes struggle with the label ‘commons’ as the tripartite process of sensory perception, sensation (a physical process based on a stimulus experience), perception (a cognitive process based on a stimulus interpretation) and expression (a multimodal process based on a reaction to a stimulus), relies upon a personal, yet also cultural, perception of the environment.
2.2. Olfactory perception of the city: the street
In the city, the street is the spatial epitome of communal space. Unlike the numerous lodgings designed for the private and intimate spheres and restricted to the family circle, and in a way similar to the relatively rare leisure spaces, either outdoors (parks) or indoors (malls), and transports hubs (stations or airports), the street represents the major cumulated space dedicated to public use as stipulated by Jacobs (1961: 39): “Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.” A bird’s eye view of any city, from Paris4 and its star-like pattern designed by Haussmann to New York5 and its grid-like pattern made of perpendicular buildings and streets, reveals the space dedicated to ambulation by its proportion of streets, avenues, broadways, boulevards, alleys, etc. The street which delineates the frontier between the private sphere and the public sphere and formalises a horizontal gap between vertical housing remains today the most common surface area dedicated to the commons. The street can be viewed as an alternative urban construction both designed for the human and the machine, for the pedestrian and the vehicle, as chronologically underlined by Fyfe (1998: 2-3):
Streets had been for walking to work or shops and for socialising. […] The corridor street must be replaced by a new type of street which will be ‘a machine for traffic’ used exclusively by fast-moving mechanical vehicles.
Two common zones are indeed materialised by the road designed for vehicles and the pavement designed for pedestrians. Viewed as a common space ironically made for a common polluted air, the road gives rise to various olfactory perceptions from the participants. Amongst forty participants who were asked the following question: “How would you describe a city in olfactory terms?”, a high proportion of answers are directly connected to the road perceived as a common area favourable to common smells such as pollution (17)6, gas (13), and fumes (10). Odours of dust (4) and smoke (1) appear also closely related to the general polluted atmosphere of the street. If the road itself can be directly targeted with tar smells (4), concrete smells (2), or indirectly with the metonymic rain-on-tar odour or cobblestones odour (2), the vehicle is also mentioned, with car smells (4). Perceived as a common space for human odours, the pavement stands for the other olfactory locus in the city. The pedestrian zone gives way to human-related odours such as cigarette odours (4), alcohol odours (1) or human body odours such as perspiration (4), urine (1), excrement (1). Amongst such unpleasant odours closely connected to the human body, either directly or indirectly through breathing or drinking, the pleasant odour of perfume (1) appears as a hapax in the olfactory urbanscape. Common food (restaurants) and common waste (bins) are the two sides of the same coin when the city allows the transformation of food to waste through a recycling process. The common food of the city finds its olfactory counterparts in neutral odours related to food (5), bad cooking smells with frying odours (2), sweet smelling cooking odours with waffle and pancake odours (2) or unhealthy cooking odours such as fast food odours (1). The common waste of the city is illustrated by odours of litter (2) and odours of sewage (4) both closely related to food consumption. After listing all olfactory urban perceptions by the participants one may wonder if solely negative odours are associated with the commons of the city. Most noun compounds (odour of x) refer, indeed, to unpleasant smells. Such a negative perspective is apparently reinforced by the recourse to negative adjectives for the qualification of city odours by the participants: bad smells (5), stifling smells (2), stale smells (1). Moreover, unpleasantness is all the more stressed by intensifying adjectives such as strong (1), saturated (1) or even repetitive (1). Only one response qualified the odour of the city as neutral (1).
2.3. Olfactory commons: Landscape vs. cityscape
If the commons of the cityscape, i.e. “landscape’s specifically urban corollary” (Lindner, 2006: 13), are essentially defined by the streets made of the road and the pavement, public space in the countryside has its archetypes of the field and the farm, not to mention paths, ditches and springs. In the countryside, the four basic common elements appear to be well perceived as proven by their olfactory counterparts. Amongst the participants answering the following question: “How would you describe the countryside in olfactory terms?”, the odours of pure air (8), earth (5), fire with wood fire (2) and the sun (1), and water with humidity (1) mirror the four common elements. Interestingly enough, the common paths are not specifically referred to as far as olfaction is concerned with only one occurrence dedicated to the odour of mud (1). More strikingly, the mythical and archetypal green field open to everyone, hence perceived as a communal area, is well represented through its olfactory counterpart: the common vegetal odour of the field. The archetypal and shared odour of the countryside is essentially vegetal: the odour of grass (17), in its various states, either cut, wet or fresh. The second archetype of the vegetal odour in the countryside is the odour of the flower (12) far ahead of its derived olfactory counterparts: odour of hay-grass (5), pollen (4) and honey (1). The odours of tree (4), wood (3) and fruit (3) end the olfactory composition of a countryside landscape. The hyperonymic symbolic odour of nature (4) and the hyperonymic biological odour of a plant (1) appear to be of a lesser interest for the olfactory perception of the countryside. Between the vegetal odours represented by the field to the animal odours represented by the farm, the odour of manure (19) partakes of a typical olfactory representation of the countryside. Halfway between the animal and the vegetal, it opens new grounds for the animal kingdom with animal odours (9), often related to the common odours of the farm (4). Such an olfactory panorama of the countryside seems oriented to pleasant odours, with the presence of positive adjectival perceptions: pleasant (2), sweet (1), warm (1) compared with a few unpleasant (1) and strong (1) odours. On a gradient of subjectivity, unlike the ‘sensible’ commons, the sensory commons and more particularly the olfactory public space display objective perceptions with a recourse to the olfactory source but also more subjective perceptions with an experiencer’s centred approach via the presence of adjectives dedicated to the effect of an olfactory stimulus. The tendency of a negative perception of the city opposed to a rather positive perception of the countryside could be explained by urban human density. To confirm such a statement, a larger analysis on a wider corpus would need to be held in the future.
3. Categorisation of smells
3.1. On categorisation
The semantics of the term ‘commons’ has ramified in diverse ways. If the noun gives rise to several distinct definitions in context, only the last physical and concrete aspect of it: iv) offices, stables, garage, outhouses (and sometimes water-closets) has been mentioned so far. It remains to deal with: i) the generality, the main body (common people), ii) vulgarity, banality (common quality, common place), iii) jointly, together (in common). By defining the concept of categorisation, it will now be possible to explore other meanings of the term ‘common’ and more specifically the adjective form as mentioned by c:
The chain of inference – from conjunction to categorization to commonality – is the norm. The inference is based on the common idea of what it means to be in the same category: things are categorized together on the basis of what they have in common. The idea that categories are defined by common properties is not only our everyday folk theory of what category is, it is also the principal technical theory – one that has been for us for more than two thousand years.
– Lakoff (1987: 6)
If the adjectival expression ‘common idea’ expresses the usual, the everyday and frequent idea, the adjectival form ‘common properties’, and the nominal expression ‘in common’ refer to commonality viewed as similarity. Categorisation bears in itself the observation of similarities, commonalities (Foucault, 1966). To put it differently, the mental construction of categories depends on the acknowledgment of common features. The recognition of such common elements in our surrounding world is of utmost importance since categorisation is vital for any human being, as underlined by Lakoff (1987: 6):
Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives. An understanding of how we categorize is central to any understanding of how we think and how we function, and therefore central to an understanding of what makes us human.
– Lakoff (1987: 6)
Once the concept of categorisation has been defined and its pervasive characteristic recognised, a closer look at the evolution of the concept is useful to grasp the entire scope of categorisation. Aristotle’s classical approach to categorisation is strict in the sense that things belong to one category or another with no possibility of being in between (Lakoff, 1987: 6): “Categories were thought to be well understood and unproblematic. They were assumed to be abstract containers, with things either inside or outside the category”. With Aristotle, the distinction between different clear-cut categories rests on the existence of common features (e.g. tactile common properties) as developed by Lakoff (1987: 16): “The classical category has clear boundaries, which are defined by common properties”. The principle of common features being required in order to define a category is denied by Wittgenstein’s approach (Lakoff, 1987: 16) anchored on family resemblances (e.g. perfume olfactory families):
Wittgenstein pointed out that a category like game does not fit the classical mold, since there are no common properties shared by all games. […] Though there is no single collection of properties that all games share, the category of games is united by what Wittgenstein calls family resemblances.
– Lakoff (1987: 16
The common feature trait is loosened in the family resemblances trait, the latter losing even more the idea of strict partitioning in Zadeh’s approach based on gradual conception (e.g. sound gradation) as Lakoff reminds us (1987: 56):
Some categories, like tall man or red, are graded; that is, they have inherent degrees of membership, fuzzy boundaries, and central members whose degree of membership (on a scale from zero to one) is one.
– Lakoff ((1987: 56)
The gradual conception adds the idea of degree to a categorisation which was rooted in separateness through similarities. Such a degree-oriented conception paved the way to the prototypical approach initiated by Berlin and Kay (1969) and elaborated by Rosch (1978), with the advent of the prototype (e.g. colour prototypes) when “some reds are redder than others” (Rosch, 1975: 198). Such a theory appears as a compromise (Candau and Wathelet, 2011: 40), halfway between Aristotle’s maximising of categories and Brown and Berlin’s cognitive economy grounded in basicness in categorisation allowing a very limited number of categories (e.g. taste basicness in categorisation):
La catégorisation autour du prototype est sans doute un compromis entre ces deux orientations. Le prototype, qui en est le point d’équilibre et que l’on peut assimiler à un condensateur de l’information portée par les différents membres, remplit de ce fait une fonction d’allégement du fardeau cognitif.
Prototypical categorisation appears as a cognitively suitable compromise for the perception of our surrounding world, of our surrounding sensory world.
3.2. Sensory categorisation
The theoretical evolution of the concept of categorisation has shown how different sensations can adopt different approaches on categorisation. Olfaction appears better suited to family categorisation (fragrance families) when taste requires basic categorisation (sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness and umami). Sounds are better perceived with a gradual conception (decibel graduation), when colours are a good fit with a prototypical conception (“some reds are redder than others”). The categorisation of the senses hence appears to be multifaceted. Such uneasiness departs from the supposedly limited number of sensory categories. Notoriously, the Aristotelian elaboration of five senses is still pervasive today in Western Europe, as Macpherson observes (2011: 124):
Aristotle, in De Anima, famously said that there are five and only five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. (He is talking here both about the number and kind of senses that humans have and the number and kind that animals have.) This view has echoed down the centuries, advocated by a number of scholars, most recently perhaps by Matthew Nudds who says that it is “obvious” that humans have five senses and that their having this number is a truth of folk psychology.
Yet, taking into consideration the cultural bias, it seems obvious that the limitation to five senses can be over reductive (Goody, 2002: 18):
Human societies in general recognise the same senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, as we do. However, looking at the question more from the standpoint of social or cultural anthropology, there is little evidence that the recognition of senses as a category, in particular of a group of five senses, is a widespread conceptualisation outside Europe and Asia.
– Goody (2002: 18)
On a larger perspective of the sensation scope, Macpherson (2011: 126) suggests that various personal feelings can also be taken into account:
Other candidates that have been considered as being additional human senses include senses of hunger, thirst, wet and dry, the weight of objects, fullness of the bladder, suffocation and respiration, sexual appetite, and lactiferousness. Indeed, in their survey of the human senses, Rivelin and Gravelle have concluded that, “Five is obviously just not enough to account for the huge range of sensory possibilities of which the human species is capable; seventeen senses is probably a more accurate count.
– Macpherson (2011: 126)
Even among the commonly limited five senses, a hierarchy anchored in anthropology or philosophy appears. With the evolution of the human being, senses once prioritised, used for hunting and harvesting (smell and taste) have lost their vital usefulness, giving way to other senses (vision and hearing), according to Le Guérer (2002: 8):
When the nose was elevated higher above ground level, the once-dominant sense of smell weakened, the sense of sight moved to the fore, and hitherto-exciting olfactory sensations gradually came to be considered disgusting.
– Le Guérer (2002: 8)
It is perhaps little wonder, then, that the philosophy of perception supported this anthropological perception of the senses with the elaboration of a schema of higher senses and lower senses illustrated in the work of Kant (2006: 46 [§16]):
The organic senses, however, in so far as they refer to external sensation, can rightly be enumerated as not more or less than five. Three of them are more objective than subjective, that is, as empirical intuitions they contribute more to the cognition of the external object than they stir up the consciousness of the affected organ. Two, however, are more subjective than objective, that is, the idea obtained from them is more a representation of enjoyment than of cognition of the external object. Therefore, one can easily come to an agreement with others regarding the objective senses; but with respect to the subjective sense, with one and the same external empirical intuition and name of the object, the way that the subject feels affected by it can be entirely different. The senses of the first class are 1) touch (tactus), 2) sight (visus), 3) hearing (auditus). – Of the latter class are a) taste (gustus), b) smell (olfactus); taken together they are nothing but senses of organic sensation, as it were like so many external entrances prepared by nature so that the animal can distinguish objects.
– Kant (2006: 46 [§16])
Beyond the philosophical categorisation of the senses, the linguistic expression of the sensations pertains to some categorisation of the senses via naming and labelling as suggested by Bergson, quoted by Rindisbacher (1992: 187): “Mais en réalité ni sensations identiques, ni goûts multiples ; car sensations et goûts m’apparaissent comme des choses dès que je les isole et que je les nomme.” The categorisation of the senses is not only a question of similarities and requires isolation and labelling. These are powerful tools which not only describe but also shape perceptions of the world.
3.3. Measuring the olfactory sense
In the Western tradition, the categorisation of the senses has depicted the olfactory sense as a minor, lower, subjective and even disgusting sense. The measurement and the appreciation of olfactory stimuli can be cognitively and linguistically observed under four headings namely the source, the effect, the intensity, and the familiarity. Indeed, asking someone to define an odour often leads to a response mentioning the source or the effect (Rouby and Bensafi, 2002: 147). Amongst the forty participants who were asked to name three odours which had had an impact on their lives and to describe them, the reference to the source and the reference to the effect show a double orientation: the mention of the source tends to indicate an objectification of the odour while the mention of the effect seems to express a subjectification of the odour. The source is objective (odour of new paper) and object-oriented (I describe the odour of new paper) whereas the effect is subjective (I don’t like) and subject-oriented on the surface (chocolate is a particular odour) with recourse to the copular verb:
The odour of new paper when school starts again, I don’t know how to describe it. (P19)7
Chocolate is an odour that I don’t like. It reminds me of Christmas. (P2)
The categorisation of the source appears to be unlimited whereas the categorisation of the effect often depends on a hedonistic gradient from pleasant to unpleasant odours. Apart from the effect and the source, both intensity and familiarity are useful factors to measure an olfactory stimulus:
It’s a strong odour, woody, which infuses the living room when she wears it. (P13)
I remember those mornings in my childhood when I slowly woke up and could smell the odour of hot coffee my mother had just poured in. (P26)
The scale of intensity is easy to situate along a gradient from a strong odour to a weak odour; the scale of familiarity revolving around known versus unknown poles appears less easy to grade. The four aforementioned angles allow the measurement of an odour and the various combinations partake of the categorisation of an olfactory sensation. The focus on the source, as shown by the results of the forty participants to the question: “Name three odours which particularly impacted your life”, illustrates the great variety of sources for the definition of an odour. Contrary to previous collective outdoor odours in public space, odours that are remembered as having an impact on one’s life can be represented on a scale going from impersonal odours to intimate odours:
Nature as an illustration of the common sphere: 31 occurrences
Odours: petrol (6), ocean (6), after the rain (5), flower (5), fir-tree (2), manure(1), ocean breeze (1), scrub (1), snow (1), summer (1), spring (1), gas (1)
Artefacts as an illustration of the impersonal sphere: 16 occurrences
Odours: cigarette (7), new (3), old buildings (1), cold tobacco (1), smoke (1), glue (1), incense (1), candle (1)
Room as an illustration of the collective sphere: 4 occurrences
Odours: classroom (1), cinema (1), student accommodation (1), wood workshop (1)
Food as an illustration of the personal sphere: 31 occurrences
Odours: chocolate (5), food (4), cake (3), hot bread (3), coffee (2), fast food (2), orange (1), couscous (1), milk (1), cheese (1), caramel (1), pancake (1), vanilla (1), onions (1), cinnamon (1), cooking (1), mango (1), salmon (1)
Cosmetics as an illustration of the intimate sphere: 25 occurrences
Odours: perfume (18), washing powder (3), toothpaste (1), soap (1), sheet (1), chlorine (1)
Body as an illustration of the body sphere: 8 occurrences
Odours: mother (3), baby (2), shit (1), sex (1), my own smell (1)
From olfactory commons to olfactory intimacy, six different categories of odours show the large variability of olfactory sources: nature, artefact, room, food, cosmetics and body. A semantic approach such as this demonstrates the difficulty of measuring olfactory sensation due to the endless variety of olfactory sources. Yet, the recourse to categories ranging from common to intimate odours allows a sense of measurement and potential categorisation for smells. It raises a further question concerning the geographical limitation of olfactory sensation. The necessary proximity is hence visible through the concentric pattern of the different spheres with a total of 31 occurrences for the personal sphere and a total of 25 occurrences for the intimate sphere. With 31 occurrences, the common sphere is surprisingly well represented in the corpus. The semantic categorisation of odours can also be illustrated by language itself through the recourse to specific formal syntactic expressions such as adjectivation (An addictive gentle sweet odour (P14)), noun compounding (An odour of wood glue (P35)), copular verb (Chocolate is an odour that I know well and that I really like (P38)), topicalisation (It’s a salty odour and with the heat, it’s relieving (P5)), or even story-telling (When I used to go to my grandparents’, my grandmother would come to give me a kiss in my bed and wish me good night, I could always smell the sweet odour of her cream and soap. (P26)). The use of syntactic formulas mirrors the use of cognitive patterns (accumulation, assimilation, contrast) to implement, separate or assimilate odours in view of their categorisation. This categorisation is, in effect, more complex than it may have initially appeared. Besides the thematic categorisation (source, effect, intensity, familiarity) both a gradual categorisation (from impersonal odours to intimate odours) and a formal categorisation (syntactic patterns) can prove useful to identify a specific odour.
4. Mapping the smells of the city
Insights provided into the olfactory commons have provided the means to draw the outlines of an olfactory cityscape. The theoretical perspective on sensory categorisation and olfactory measuring in particular have paved the way for a better understanding of the olfactory domain and its perception. Both perspectives, theoretical and practical, have grounded the path we will now pursue to attempt to map out odours in the city. The sensor-e-map project8 which aims to map out the senses of the city has thus been shaped by theoretical (on categorisation) and practical (survey) questionings.
4.1. Mapping the senses
At a time when every square metre of the planet has nearly been recorded, revealed and exposed (i.e. Google Maps) through new technologies, the time has perhaps come to rediscover the world with human, that is, a sensory perspective. Recent ‘sensory studies’ have enabled us to observe, grasp and feel the world thanks to sensory stimuli. The mapping out of the senses is a new way to acquire knowledge of our environment, especially because our senses remain the principal medium between the outside world and our self. The exploration of the senses through a mapping process is twofold: in space and time. A synchronic spatial exploration of the senses is at work everyday with the massive accumulation of visual images and sounds through cell phone applications. Less easy to capture and store, smells and tastes are nonetheless mapped in urbanspace (e.g. Rossano Schifanella’s sensory computing, Kate McLean’s sensory maps). A diachronic historical exploration of the senses represents also a major field in ‘sensory studies’, with an attempt to recreate and locate images (e.g. Sophie Raux’s visualisation of Notre Dame bridge in 1720), sounds (e.g. Mylène Pardoen’s recreation of 18th century sounds of Paris), odours (e.g. Lauren Nicole Davis’s work on Ottoman’s market smellscapes), tastes (e.g. Cécile Batigne’s recreation of Roman cooking tastes) and fabrics from the past.
4.2. The sensor-e-map project
The project aims to map out the senses in urban space. With the starting point of olfactory walks performed in the city of Saint-Étienne, this project will establish an evolving olfactory mapping. The olfactory nodes represent as many sensory milestones to trace an olfactory path. Besides the categorisation of odour sources observable with a defined colour pattern, the values of intensity, hedonicity, and familiarity assigned to each odour, allow both a synthetic and exhaustive olfactory visualisation of a given urban space. With the help of linguists, urban planners, and developers from the university of Saint-Étienne, the sensory cityscape is hence both formalised and questioned.
4.3. An attempt to map the smells of the city
Method
The forty participants (aged between 19 and 24) were asked to perform smellwalks in Saint-Étienne. With a partitioning of the city in six districts, each participant was given one district to explore (a map) and one questionnaire where they could list various odours they came across. Each odour was to be listed with its precise location in the city.
Variables
For each odour listed in the table, the participants were asked to situate it precisely, stipulate if the odour was an outdoor or indoor odour, categorise the source of it with the help of a given nomenclature and grade it on a scale from 1 to 10 according to personal perceptions of its intensity, hedonicity and familiarity. Such detailed information was to allow a thorough representation and visualisation of each odour captured.
Visualisation
The collection of all questionnaires was analysed and problematic answers were discarded. Realised by Lucas Dubouchet under the supervision of Philippe Colantoni, the visualisation of olfactory walks allows two levels of reading urban smells. On a surface level, olfactory paths can be observed on the map thanks to the sketching of lines (static mode) or thanks to the popping up of various circles (dynamic mode) which are different in colour (type of odour) and size (mutual agreement).
Figure 1. Olfactory paths (static mode)
Figure 2. Olfactory circles (dynamic mode)
On a different level, each node, i.e. odour, on top of its location on the map, is assigned a type (colour), a source (text above), a mutual agreement factor (size of the circle), and three other variables (intensity, valence (i.e. hedonicity, appreciation), familiarity) in the shape of a triangle inside the circle.
Figure 3. Close-up of olfactory nodes
The choice of visualising all factors or one factor only (source, intensity, hedonicity, familiarity), offers the possibility of a personal exploration of an olfactory cityscape.
Figure 4. Controls
Improvements in space and time could be developed in the future with the implementation of a stronger network of the paths on the one hand and a precisely-timed walk on the other hand.
5. Conclusion
An insight into olfactory commons has shown how public urban space is generally perceived in reaction to a rural imaginary. A theoretical approach to the categorisation of the senses and more precisely of odours with the focus on the existence of various distinctive factors (source, effect, intensity, familiarity) and the questioning of the geographical limitation (from common sphere to intimate sphere) define different useful variables for the visualisation of the smellscape of a city. The forty participants who answered questions and performed smellwalks in Saint-Étienne have provided us with a denser perception, representation, and visualisation of a given olfactory urbanscape.
The implementation of a dynamic visual mapping of the smells in the city, under different variable headings (type, hedonicity, intensity, familiarity) allows to give a general, yet thorough, olfactory perception of a city, which could have concrete applications, such as taking olfaction into consideration when looking for a flat in a city (avoiding unpleasant smells or seeking a pleasant olfactory environment), searching for information about a city via the olfactory parameter, organising olfactory walks aimed for tourists, or even recreating an olfactory urbanspace from the past.
Notes
1. According to Paquot (2018: 9) the polysensory perception of a landscape has only recently been acknowledged: “Depuis une quinzaine d’années, cette suprématie du regard se trouve chahutée et l’on commence à admettre qu’un paysage se ressent sensoriellement.”
2. For a broader analysis of the public space in Saint-Étienne, see Altas des espaces publics: Saint-Étienne, une ville laboratoire (Pichon and Herbert, 2014).
3. For an exhaustive definition of the concepts of territorology and territoriality, see Retailing Space. Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space (Kärrholm, 2012).
4. For a better comprehension of Paris olfactory urbanspace, see Sentir Paris. Bien être et matérialité des lieux (Grésillon, 2010).
5. For a wider perspective on New York urban space, see Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities (Manolescu, 2018).
6. The figure in parenthesis corresponds to the number of occurrences found in the corpus.
7. The figure preceded by P for ‘participant’ corresponds to a numbered informant.
8. Available at https://viva-arts.univ-st-etienne.fr/CartesSensibles/
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