Introduction

The starting point of the City and the Senses is an historical interest in the sensory dimension of city life to which the five bodily senses, traditionally recognised in Western thought, ¹ contribute. And although psychologists tell us that the bulk of the information that fuels the human perceptual system is provided by the visual sense, each of the other sensations, touch, taste, sound and smell, contribute to the processes that produce an individual’s particular sensory world. ² Cities conceived of as sensory environments and sites of habitation generate their own distinctive smells and sounds. They are full of visual and tactile stimuli, each with their own range of symbolic meanings for the sentient, perceiving subject. But, as Walter Benjamin noted of nineteenth-century Paris, ‘All that remains of the increasingly swift dissipation of perceptual worlds is “nothing other than their names: Passagen”.’ ³