Thursday, July 16, 2015

Smelly Maps of London & Barcelona


London Smellscapes (another version with darker map tiles) sets out to map the prevailing types of smells on London's streets. What is most amazing is that it does this by using Flickr photos. Or rather it manages to map the prevailing smells by using smell-related words tagged on Flickr photos.

The map colors London streets by four different smells, 'emissions', 'nature', 'food' and 'animals'. If you explore the map you will find that nature and animal related smells seem to occur predominantly in parks. Unsurprisingly London Zoo (in Regents Park) is completely dominated by animal smells.

Barcelona also has its own Barcelona Smellscape map. In Barcelona you'll find that the Parc de la Ciutadella is also full of animal related smells. That just might be because it is home to the city's zoo. La Rambla has a number of dominant smells along its length, including animal smells (presumably from all those caged birds), food smells (lovely al fresco dining) and emission smells (bloody cars).

You can learn more about how the four different smell categories were determined and how the map was created on the CartoDB blog.

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