The Emotional and Chromatic Layers of Urban Smells

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel methodology using geo-tagged images to analyze urban smellscapes, revealing how smells vary over time and space, their emotional impact, and their chromatic associations, aiding urban planning.

Contribution

It presents a new approach to study urban odors through social media data, addressing gaps in understanding smell dynamics, emotions, and colors associated with city smells.

Findings

Urban smellscapes vary significantly across time and space.

Certain smells are linked to specific emotional responses.

Some odors have identifiable chromatic associations.

Abstract

People are able to detect up to 1 trillion odors. Yet, city planning is concerned only with a few bad odors, mainly because odors are currently captured only through complaints made by urban dwellers. To capture both good and bad odors, we resort to a methodology that has been recently proposed and relies on tagging information of geo-referenced pictures. In doing so for the cities of London and Barcelona, this work makes three new contributions. We study 1) how the urban smellscape changes in time and space; 2) which emotions people share at places with specific smells; and 3) what is the color of a smell, if it exists. Without social media data, insights about those three aspects have been difficult to produce in the past, further delaying the creation of urban restorative experiences.