Speaker Series—Making Smell Count

Join us for lunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Friday, November 21st, at 12 PM CST.

The in-person option is open the University of Illinois community (students, staff, and faculty). Please use the RSVP option on the right for the in-person portion of the event. We will have lunch for all attendees who RSVP by Wednesday @ 10AM before the event.

A virtual option via Zoom is available for the public. To register for the Zoom option, please access the following link:

Smells can shape people’s perceptions of urban spaces, influencing how individuals relate to their urban environment physically and emotionally. Although the urban environment has long been conceived as a multisensory experience, research has mainly focused on the visual dimension, leaving smell largely understudied. This research introduces “olfactory thinking”, which posits smell as an important aspect of urban wellbeing and sensory richness. To begin to understand this relatively neglected sensory dimension in urban studies, this research first employs in-depth interviews with participants from nine counties to understand the everyday smell encounters that influence how people experience and interpret urban spaces. These insights reveal the nuanced roles of smell in shaping wellbeing, identity, and belonging, as well as inform potential strategies for integrating olfactory considerations into urban design and policy. The second part of this research develops a flexible and efficient bottom-up framework for capturing and classifying perceived urban smells from individuals based on geosocial media data. We take New York City as a case study and decode perceived smells by teasing out specific smell-related indicator words through text mining techniques from a long-term geotagged Twitter data. The results demonstrate that the proposed multifaceted approach, combining quantitative analysis with qualitative insights, can not only reveal “hidden” influential neighborhoods with clear spatial smell patterns, but also capture elusive smells that may otherwise be overlooked. By making perceived smells measurable and visible, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of smellscapes and people’s sensory experiences within the urban environment. Overall, this research opens up new possibilities for understanding urban spaces through an olfactory lens, contributing to the broader field of multisensory urban experience research.

Qingqing Chen, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Applied GIS in the School of Integrated Sciences at James Madison University. Her research focuses on critically understanding how cities function by leveraging (geo)computational techniques and data informatics. She is particularly interested in urban geography, geographic data science, multisensory urban experience, and the use of social media and big data in urban analytics. Qingqing received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University at Buffalo and holds an M.Sc. in Physics from the National University of Singapore. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a Research Associate at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and as a Research Engineer at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre.

Healthy Regions & Policies Lab integrates innovative GIScience, public health, and statistical approaches to explore, understand, and promote healthy places. We’re experts in the spatial & social determinants of health. We're based out of the Dept of Geography & GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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