The map you can’t see: why Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie is charting our smellscapes

I have thousands of photos of cities I love, and exactly zero ways to save the way they smelled. That gap is not cute. It is a cultural blind spot. Which is why I am riveted by Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie, the designer and researcher at the University of Kent who has been patiently doing something deceptively radical for years: mapping smellscapes.

Think about what we do so well already. We share what we see, we store what we hear. But the scents that make a street corner feel like a secret, or turn a memory into a gut punch, vanish before we can even name them. McLean-MacKenzie started interrogating that problem more than a decade ago, then walked it, sniffed it, surveyed it, and charted it across multiple cities. The result is a set of olfactory maps that stitch together the volatile, the seasonal, the hyperlocal. Wet pavement after a bus braking. Sun-warmed citrus peels outside a market. Eucalyptus ghosts in winter parks. It’s data, yes, but it’s also a diary.

As a fragrance reporter, I feel the punch of this work in my nose and in my notebook. Perfumery talks about place all the time, yet our references skew to the familiar, smoothed by nostalgia. A living archive of smellscapes pushes against that. It invites perfumers to sample the real urban accord, not the postcard version. It invites cities to consider how policy shapes air, and how air shapes memory. It invites all of us to finally give language to the scents that run our lives.

There’s a quiet provocation here. If we can map a neighborhood’s coffee bloom at 7 am and its hot rubber at 5 pm, what deserves preservation, and what demands change. If we can share a smell map like we share a photo grid, who owns it, and who gets to edit it.

I want a world where a bottle brief comes with the map of its air. Where a museum of scent catalogs arrivals and departures like trains. Where we stop pretending smell is too subjective to hold. Dr Kate McLean-MacKenzie is showing that it can be held, carefully, city by city. The rest of us should catch up.