Smell has a huge influence over how we perceive places. Despite its importance, smell has been crucially overlooked by urban planners and scientists alike, not least because it is difficult to record and analyze at scale. One of the authors of this paper has ventured out in the urban world and conducted smellwalks in a variety of cities: participants were exposed to a range of different smellscapes and asked to record their experiences. As a result, smell-related words have been collected and classified, creating the first dictionary for urban smell. Here we explore the possibility of using social media data to reliably map the smells of entire cities. To this end, for both Barcelona and London, we collect geo-referenced picture tags from Flickr and Instagram, and geo-referenced tweets from Twitter. We match those tags and tweets with the words in the smell dictionary. We find that smell-related words are best classified in ten categories. We also find that specific categories (e.g., industry, transport, cleaning) correlate with governmental air quality indicators, adding validity to our study.
Online participatory mapping allows web users to annotate pre-designed base maps with odor markers @cite_25 . This method promises to be scalable, but engaging enough people to participate is hard.
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List of Figures and Charts Acknowledgements Glossary Chatper One: Introduction PART I: SMELL, SOCIETY AND CITIES Chapter Two: Perspectives on Smell and the City: Part I Chapter Three: Perspectives on Smell and the City: Part II Chapter Four: Smellwalking and Representing Urban Smellscapes PART 2: SMELL SOURCES IN THE CITY Chapter Five: Air Quality, Pollution and Smell Chapter Six: Food and Smell Chapter Seven: Urban Policy and Smell PART 3: SMELLSCAPE CONTROL, DESIGN AND PLACEMAKING Chapter Eight: Processes of Odour Management and Control in the City Chapter Nine: Designing with Smell - Restorative Environments and Design Tools Chapter Ten: Odour, Placemaking and Urban Smellscape Design Conclusion References