On Sense, Place and Mapping
I’m researching why sensory experiences matter so much in how we understand a place, and why mapping might be a useful way to work with that kind of information — especially when the information is fleeting, affective, and hard to quantify.
Some questions I keep returning to:
- Why do multisensory experiences matter in our understanding of a place?
- Why use mapping as an approach to record and represent sensory information?
- How do maps shape how we perceive a space or navigate through it?
- What can maps be and represent, beyond static spatial layouts?
- What does it mean to map something that is transient, invisible, or subjective?
These questions are emerging alongside readings in sensory studies, psychogeography, and cartographic practices.
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar?
Emotion, memory, and the senses
Kate McLean’s work — Emotion, Location and the Senses [2], Mapping the Invisible and the Ephemeral [3], and Nose First [4] — are my recurring references. Some goals and concerns I’m pulling from her work (paraphrasing / interpreting here):
- Showing how emotion, location, and memory are linked at both semiotic and personal levels.
- Considering the nature of temporality when mapping transient & ephemeral sensory information — accepting that any such map is a record of a moment, not a stable truth.
- What can maps be and represent, beyond static spatial layouts?
- Presenting an environment, communicated through its sensory stimuli, and testing whether those stimuli evoke associative memories of other moments, places, or emotions.
There’s a recurring tension here: smell is significant, yet invisible and ephemeral. Mapping becomes a way to work with this contradiction rather than resolve it.
Psychogeography and sensory encounters
Psychogeography is central to my inquiry, particularly in how it legitimises sensory, affective, and subjective experience of knowing place. Debord’s dérive, as articulated in The Naked City [5], foregrounds movement without a destination. Walking becomes a method for encountering the city beyond the mundane. Sensory experience is
- Situated — it happens somewhere, but not always where expected
- Transient — it appears, shifts, and disappears
- Affective — it registers as feeling before it becomes interpretation
Batty’s proposal [6] to understand the city as a series of “spatial events” rather than fixed infrastructures aligns closely with this. If the city is constituted through events in time and space — characterised by duration, intensity, volatility, and location — then sensory experiences are not peripheral data, but key evidence to how the city is lived. This begins to explain why mapping must shift from documenting brick and mortar to recording activity, rhythms, and atmospheres [7].
I’m still unsure how far psychogeographic practices can be formalised without losing what makes them useful, but they seem to provide a bridge between sensory experience and spatial representation that more traditional methods struggle to offer.
Mapping, urbanism, and objectivity
Cosgrove [8] argues that there’s still much to be done in adding humanity to urban landscapes and modern cartography. The contemporary city is complex, dynamic, and living — and mapping might be the only medium through which it can achieve visual coherence.
The goal of rendering legible the complex, dynamic and living entity that is a city remains an urgent one. At the same time, the scientific paradigm of cartography (Corner, 2011) treats maps as ‘directly analogous to actual ground conditions’, and as such, ‘maps are taken to be “true” and “objective” measures of the world’.
Sensory studies and the spatiality of the senses
The spatiality of senses mediates our perception and relationship to space. One starting point is the idea that each sense has a different spatial reach. Smell and touch are often described as intimate senses — operating close to the body and tied to immediacy — while sight and hearing are framed as distant senses, allowing perception beyond the body’s immediate reach. This distinction already carries an implicit hierarchy, one that privileges distance and separation over proximity and immersion.
Tuan’s work [9] is key here because it calls attention to the spatiality of the senses and their role in shaping the affective relation of people to their habitat. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better [through our senses] and endow it with value”.
Space becomes place as it is encountered, differentiated, and valued through sensory experience. This shifts emphasis away from abstract spatial organisation and toward lived, affective relations.
Howes [7] extends this by arguing that the senses are not neutral channels. They are culturally organised, historically shaped, and politically weighted. Sensory perception is therefore not just physiological, but social. What is sensed, how it is sensed, and which senses are prioritised all shape how environments are understood and represented. This has methodological implications.
Techniques such as remote sensing and conventional mapping assume that distance produces objectivity. In contrast, intimate sensing — though messy, embodied, and difficult to standardise — may be more grounded in geographic reality [10]. Sensory data resists neat abstraction precisely because it is entangled with bodies, memory, and context.
Sensory studies seem to suggest that any account of place that privileges only one sensory mode is partial, and that mapping practices need to reckon with this partiality rather than conceal it.