Map of the Week: Mapping scent in Cityscapes

This project aims to capture the urban smellscape through digital data, celebrating the positive role that smell plays in city life. By collecting smell-related words from literature and crawling pictures tagged with those terms from Creative Commons Flickr photos, Rossano Schifanella was able to automatically detect semantically coherent smell categories and map the smellscape of entire cities using CartoDB. The resulting maps show characteristic smells at a street segment level, highlighting the most common smell categories in each area. By sharing his results with a broad audience through interactive and visually appealing maps, Rossano aims to disseminate his findings on the importance of smell in urban planning.