ABSTRACT
What do things look like? What colours do you see? How far can you see? What do you smell? What sounds do you hear? What do you feel? What do you touch? The city is an assault on the senses. Cities are sensory, emotional experiences, for good and for bad. But we are not accustomed to articulating things in this way: the smelling, hearing, seeing, touching and even tasting of the city are left to travel literature and brochures. It taxes our vocabulary as we are used to describing the city in an ‘objective' lexicon deprived of sensory descriptives. We thus experience the city at a low level of awareness. We do not recognize, let alone describe, its smellscape, soundscape, visual spectacle, tactile texture or taste sufficiently. Our impoverished articulation is made all the worse because the city can overwhelm our senses – honking, flashing, whirring, whizzing, precipitous, huge, confusing. Too often, urban stimuli induce a closing rather than opening out of our senses. Depleted, drained and defensive, our field of experience is diminished.
