Decoding Smellscape

This work develops a bottom-up approach for identifying and mapping perceived urban smells from geosocial media. It grew from a simple gap in much urban analytics work: we often study what cities look like and how people move through them, but far less often study how cities smell.

Using New York City as a case study, the project mines smell-related language from geosocial media to identify places where food, nature, waste, transportation, and other smell categories become visible in text. The work contributes to a broader multisensory understanding of urban environments by making perceived smells measurable, mappable, and open to spatial interpretation.

Links: Project page · Publication page · https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2025.2485233