VIRTUAL Lisbon Livable Cities

Abstract

Environments, urban or otherwise, change constantly, as do the risks and benefits associated with such change. People respond to these changes through embodied, networked, and mediated ways, shaping how people perceive risk and who bears the brunt of natural and human-designed hazards. Urban design can encode and reproduce oppressive biases, affecting how people characterize risk and assess environmental hazards across the globe. Drawing on principles of design justice and community-engaged risk assessment, in this presentation I evaluate how the voices and embodied concerns of residents affected by ineffective urban planning can advance environmental justice in international settings. The goal is to create and foster more livable cities though environmental design attuned to sensory experiences. Specifically, I evaluate how olfactory persuasion affects human perception about the livability and health of a place. We see, hear, and feel a city, but foremost, we smell it. The pleasant and the putrid comingle. How do we engage and design a livable smellscape? Informed by sensory studies and environmental rhetoric scholarship, I offer a heuristic others can apply to different places and spaces to evaluate how people navigate and perceive the health of their smellscape. The acronym SCENT represents the key features of the heuristic. Sensing and searching for olfactory persuasion (S), the context of the encounter (C), the emplaced and embodied a/effects of the interaction (E), the narratives people relay about the experiences (N), and the tactics people use to convince policymakers to address potential risks, and the transformations that can result (T).