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This book explores the overlooked role of smell in architecture, design, and urban life, positioning olfaction as a powerful medium for shaping place, atmosphere, and experience. Beginning with the concept of the "scentsphere," it establishes how smells carry cultural memory, therapeutic potential, and behavioural influence, reframing them as active agents in how environments are felt and understood. Building on this foundation, the text introduces a framework for creating smell-spatial narratives, a step-by-step manifesto for creatives to integrate smells into their spatial practices.
Smells are conceptualised as spatial design materials and it shifts the paradigm of smells from the intangible to the tangible with new concepts of "scentability", "scentography" and "scentonics". Case studies from art, architecture, and urban design illustrate practical interventions, from scented materials to landscapes and devices, showing how olfactory design operates across scales and durations. Concluding with a futurist outlook, the book situates smellscape ecology within climate change and inclusive, life-centred design, introducing "olfactory diversity" as a guiding principle.
This book is essential reading for spatial designers in interior architecture and design, architecture, stage design, situated practice, art practice, curation, event design and management.
List of contents
1. Scents of place 2. Creating smell-spatial narratives 3. Materialising smellscapes 4. Case Studies 5. Towards a smellscape ecology
About the author
Jieling Xiao is Reader in Architecture and Sensory Environments at the Birmingham City University, UK. Trained as an architect and urban designer, Jieling believes that designers need to consider more than just how the hardware of architecture functions for its users. Interested in creative spatial practice related to people's sensory experiences, she has developed her research and research-led teaching on smellscapes and soundscapes looking at theories and design frameworks that take an appreciative approach to deal with sounds and smells in the built environment. She is the lead editor of the Frontiers research topic "smell, wellbeing and built environment" and funder of the smellscape catalogue (www.smellscapecatalogue.com), a digital archive of smellscape interventions.
