Practices in Smelling: Spaces in Time

Getting new impressions of familiar places.

This month we continue with the series, “Practices in Smelling,” which aims to inspire and animate you to engage with your sense of smell more.

I came across a fun article the other day called Stop And Sniff In These Best-Smelling European Cities which ranked 30 European cities according to a kind of “smell index,” based on the number of bakeries, florists, and perfume shops the city had. 

That got me thinking about my own town and how smelly it is. Interestingly, according to these measures, it’s pretty smelly, as we have a few perfume shops, several florists, and a number of wonderful bakeries. But honestly, I don’t believe that’s a great way to determine how olfactory-rich a city is.

To me a smell index communicates what the city actually smells like, and how intense the smells are. It’s a mosaic of odors that blend into an olfactory footprint of a city at any given moment in time. The popular name for this impression is SMELLSCAPE.

A smellscape is a collection of odors that you experience in a space you occupy at a particular time. It’s mostly an individual experience because it’s predicated on what you, yourself, smell. But it can be collective as well. My town, for example, has a chocolate factory and many of our streets are lined with eucalyptus trees, so the general smellscape of my town usually has notes of chocolate and eucalyptus wafting in the air at any given time.    

Which brings me to today’s practice in smelling. Do you know what your town/city smells like? You probably haven’t thought about it much, which is understandable. But how about we find out!

The benefit of olfactively evaluating a space (your city/town) in time is that you learn something new about a place. You get fresh perspectives because you’re noticing things you hadn’t noticed before. And that gives you greater connection. 

Here’s how to do it.