Bells and Bagels
When Hawes thinks of his hometown of Montreal, he thinks of the melodious sound of bells, the aroma of wood-fired bagels. But when he goes to the local visitor center for advice on where tourists should go to smell, taste or listen to the city, he is greeted with blank stares.
"They only know what to see, but they don't know anything about the city's other sensory attractions, such as sound landmarks, smells," said Hawes, author of the forthcoming Manifesto for Sensory Research and director of the Center for Sensory Research at Concordia University. These are landmarks.” The Center for Sensory Research, which he leads, is also one of the strongholds of so-called “sensory urbanism.”
All over the world, researchers like Howth are studying how non-visual information defines the character of a city and affects its livability. From low-tech sound walks and smell maps to high-tech data scraping, wearables and virtual reality, they are fighting narrow visual biases in urban planning in a variety of ways.
Sound Walk in Istanbul
"As long as you can close your eyes for even 10 minutes, you can have a completely different feeling about a place," says scholar and musician O?uz ?ner.
Öner has been organizing sound walks in Istanbul for years, asking blindfolded participants to describe the sounds they heard in various locations. His research helped identify places where vegetation could be planted to dampen traffic noise, or where a wave organ could be built to amplify the soothing sound of the sea, the latter starting from the fact that he was surprised to find that even on the coast, people The sound of the sea could hardly be heard.
Shhh! be quieter
Öner said local local officials had expressed interest in his findings, but had yet to incorporate them into formal city planning. In Berlin, however, this personalised feedback on the sensory environment is already in use, and quiet areas selected by citizens using a free app are included in Berlin's latest Noise Action Plan. Under EU law, the city is now obliged to protect these spaces from increased noise.
"The way to define whether an area is quiet is usually top-down, either based on land use properties or on high-level parameters such as distance from a motorway," explains Aretta, a research associate at UCL. As far as I know, this is the first time something that is perceptually driven has actually become policy."
As a member of the EU-funded Soundscape Indices project, Aretta is working on creating a predictive model that starts with recordings of various ambient sounds— — including vibrant neighborhoods and quiet environments — are compiled into the database, and then tested for the neurological and physiological responses they elicit to predict how people will respond to various acoustic environments. Ensuring that multi-sensory elements are included in a city's design standards and planning process requires a practical framework, and such tools are needed to build that framework, experts say.
In fact, the precedents for building cities based on human behavior, sensory information, and other environmental information have been around for a few years. In 2017, Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google's parent company Alphabet, cooperated with the Canadian government to plan to land a high-tech sensing city in Toronto's Waterfront Industrial Zone (selected in the 2018 MIT Technology Review "Top Ten Breakthrough Technologies in the World"). ”), building a smart community with its own “operating system” with the help of a huge network of sensors and technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data, and the Internet of Things, and keeping it open source to encourage companies to create services for it (like developing for mobile phones the same as the APP). While that feat was ultimately shelved in 2020 due to "the impact of the coronavirus and unprecedented economic uncertainty," it's still very valuable for our thinking.
High-tech vision
Even within this field, however, the best way to determine how people respond to different sensory environments has been controversial. Hawes and his colleagues took a more humanistic approach, relying on observations and interviews to develop a set of best practices for sensory design in public spaces. Other researchers have gone the high-tech route, using wearables to track biometric data and use metrics such as heart rate changes to define people's emotional responses to different sensory experiences. The latter is used by the EU-funded GoGreen Routes project, which is currently investigating how to integrate nature into urban spaces to improve human health and the environment.
There is no doubt that this "high-tech route" has benefited from the rapid development of wearable devices in recent years, one of the most representative of which is the wearable electrocardiograph. It has the convenience of a wearable device, but at the same time can provide the accuracy close to that of a medical device, so that people can easily and continuously monitor their heart health. Technology" is an indispensable part of smart life.
What we're doing is like making up a dictionary of elements, with guidelines on how to combine them to create a complete spatial experience. Daniel, of Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge, Centre for Urban Science and Development, King's College London, who was one of the researchers on the project, has also previously helped develop a separate focus on city sounds and smells by scraping data from social media. "ChattyMaps" and "Smelly Maps", and through the latter found a strong correlation between people's perception of smell and more traditional air quality metrics. And through the GoGreenRoutes project, he will use wearable technology to evaluate new and Whether improvements in the design of existing green spaces have the expected (and expected) impact on people's well-being.
At Deakin University in Australia, Beza, a professor of architecture, aims for a fully immersive experience. He The team is currently adding sound and, eventually, scents and textures to the VR environment, and city officials can use this VR technology to present planning projects to stakeholders. It is too difficult to visualize a static drawing of a , park or square. "Beza said, "If you can 'walk' in between, and you can hear the sound, you can be 'immersive' and help them understand." "
Is it your nose, or my ears?
As the collection of data on people's sensory experiences becomes more commonplace, many of these experts caution that issues such as privacy and surveillance need to be factored in, and, moreover, whose sensory experience should be factored into planning , issues of equity and inclusion also arise. For example, residents of poor neighborhoods in cities often bear the brunt of noise from highways, factories, and air pollution, but at the same time, when neighborhoods gentrify, they are often the targets of noise complaints.
"Sensory perception is not neutral, dispassionate, and by no means fully expressed by biological indicators," explains Deegan, a sociologist of urban culture at Brunel University in London. "Whether something is What makes us happy is determined by the different cultural and social contexts we find ourselves in.” Urban planners in London and Barcelona are using her research (to guide their work), including her perception of public space research, and how what she calls "sensory class differences" can include or exclude different groups of people.
Deegan gave the example of a community in London. There, cheap eateries frequented by local young people are replaced by trendy cafes. “It used to smell like fried chicken,” she said, but the new residents didn’t like it, but found the aroma offensive, so “now it smells like a cappuccino.”
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