IN APRIL I led a “” through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar. In the past decade, I have conducted hundreds of these sensory tours in 15 cities across Europe and North America, but even so I was struck by the intensity of the experience.
We could hardly move for the crowds, and the echo of voices and footsteps was sporadically interrupted by the call to prayer. The strongest connection to our surroundings, however, came from the smells: the warm air, people’s perfumes and body odour, leather, spices, Turkish delight. As we moved out to the streets surrounding the Bazaar, the smells changed: the stink of drains, cigarettes, fruit and sweetcorn being cooked in the street.
Fast forward a few weeks and I am walking through Old Spitalfields Market in London. I smell nothing until I reach the far end of the market where I detect some faint ventilation emissions from a restaurant. Later, in a side street just off Regent Street, I bend down to smell the lavender growing in pots, only to find they are plastic.
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Smells, scents, whiffs and stinks are incredibly important in our experience and understanding of the surrounding world. By this, I am referring not only to idealised smell environments such as those experienced during trips to the seaside or idyllic rural enclaves, but also to everyday experiences of living in cities. Sadly, though, it usually isn’t until we lose our sense of smell that we appreciate just how important it is. , a UK charity supporting people with smell and taste disorders, launched this year with the goal of increasing the awareness of the importance of smell in our lives, so that such people might have their symptoms taken more seriously. In a recent survey of 485 of its members, the charity found that 56 per cent felt alone and isolated as a result of their condition, 85 per cent were afraid of being exposed to dangers such as gas or spoiled food and 42 per cent had depression.
Although the olfactory detection abilities of humans are poor compared with many other mammals, they are far more sophisticated than was previously thought. In March this year, a study at Rockefeller University and the Howard Hughes Institute revealed that humans with a fully functioning sense of smell can distinguish at least 1 trillion odours, rather than the previous benchmark of 10,000 odours.
Yet within Western culture, people tend to think of smell as having a predominantly negative role to play in city life. As a result, the smellscapes of city streets are turning into sterilised clones of one another. Historically, there was a good reason for this focus on sterility. In medieval times, cities were dirty, disease-riddled environments where the toxic odours of the tallow chandlers and tanneries mixed with the stench of the open sewers, and it was commonly believed that illness spread through the breathing in of noxious miasmas leaking from the ground.
“The smellscapes of city streets are turning into sterilised clones”
After in 1854 and the role of bacteria in disease became understood, governments began to place emphasis on the importance of sanitation in public health. This led to cleaning of the air and waterways, new materials being introduced to cover the mud and waste in the street and, with time, the development of our obsession with surfaces such as concrete, glass, metal and tarmac; hard-wearing and easily washable.
However, something strange is happening as a result of these developments. City streets may be less smelly, but urban dwellers are becoming increasingly sensitive to the smells that remain. In some parts of Canada and the US, this is leading to and people become ill as a result of exposure to different types of environmental stimuli, most notably odours. In some cases this causes nausea, headaches and respiratory problems – but more commonly it results in annoyance, which also has an effect on health over the longer-term.
In response to these concerns, last month the UK Institute of Air Quality Management (IAQM) launched for how smells should be considered in the planning process. The document outlines the factors currently taken into account by the authorities to evaluate smells, and highlights case law in which any odour, if breathed in at high-enough concentrations for a sufficient amount of the time (2 per cent of the hours in a year), can be deemed as a potential nuisance.
In my research, however, I have found that the odours that some people complain about can be historical and locally significant smells that are liked by many people. These odours include strong-smelling restaurants and the manufacturing smells of many cities such as those emitted by breweries, chocolate and sweet factories.
It is generally assumed that city dwellers are the people most likely to be annoyed by smells, mainly because cities have so many people gathered together in one place. However, , which was highlighted by studies like the one published last year by Agnieszka Sorokowska of the University of Wroclaw in Poland and her colleagues (PLoS One, ). In part, this is thought to be an effect of pollution, which can impair our ability to detect smells on a temporary or permanent basis. It is also a product of culture and prior experience, with urban dwellers frequently being less familiar with, and placing a lower value on, information gained through the sense of smell.
As the IAQM guidance highlights, almost all environmental odours – whether agricultural, brewing smells or the odours emitted from a coffee shop – are considered to be a nuisance when detected in the home, and some of us get more annoyed by these intrusive smells than others. As cities become denser, this issue will be increasingly important. How might we learn to cope with the smells emitted from our neighbours’ homes, whether these be cooking odours or cigarette smoke, particularly when our expectations of deodorisation, sterilisation and, ultimately, control have been pushed to such a high level in the street?
By attempting to deodorise our urban environments, we have gone a step too far. Just as it is important for children to play in dirt in order to build their immune systems, it could well be healthier to be exposed to a range of smells in city streets so that we are better able to cope when exposed to strong and unusual odours or those we are unable to control. And what about the potential delight that odour offers us in our experiences of places such as Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar? By coming down hard on smells, we lose these valuable sensory inputs.
See the smellscapes New Scientist readers say they like best: “Your favourite city smellscapes in pictures“
This article appeared in print under the headline “Welcome to the smellscape”
