By Bianca Bosker April 3, 2017 Recording the olfactory landscape of cities such as New York can provide a record of how odors change as cities evolve.
And Rhys-Taylor, a sociologist from the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths College, thinks smell is one of the hidden hands shaping cities, creating "olfactory signatures" that become key parts of urban identity.
These are far graver situations, surely, than the olfactory hazards of summer in the city, but Patus envisions consumer applications for Odorscreen, too, and New York is high on the company's list of stinky target markets.
Other odor advocates fear that cities are morphing into olfactory clones as a familiar mix of chain restaurants, stores, and hotels pumping fragrances and food fumes into the air spreads around the world.
Here, five of the city's trendsetters reveal their own androgynous olfactory obsessions.
The heat and humidity would distill the pungent aromas of the fermenting hops in the breweries into an olfactory miasma that settled like a fog over the city.
Furthermore, a study of Mexico city residents, showed higher levels of neuroinflammation of the olfactory bulb (as indicated by higher levels of COX 2 and IL1β) and higher concentrations of metals associated with PM (including manganese, nickel and chromium) among inhabitants of urban areas [ 35].
McLean has worked with hundreds of volunteers to identify the odors of cities from Edinburgh to Singapore, and then to map the unique olfactory landscapes, or "smellscapes," of those locales.
For one thing, it includes olfactory surprises.
Each city's smell profile is necessarily complex and very much in the nose of the beholder, as every one of us will pick and mix from odours to assemble an olfactory profile of the place.
