Sensegeography

Sensegeography is an emerging interdisciplinary field that studies how human senses influence the perception, representation, and use of space. It considers how vision, hearing, smell, touch, and proprioception contribute to the experience of places, the way people navigate environments, and how those experiences are encoded in memory and mapped in graphs, routes, and mental models. The term is used to describe both the sensory dimensions of place and the spatial distribution of sensory stimuli, such as soundscapes, olfactory landscapes, or tactile cues.

Scholars draw on geography, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, urban studies, and design. Methods include sensory ethnography, participant observation, interviews about sensory experiences, multisensory mapping with maps that encode qualitative sensory data, audio-visual field recordings, olfactory mapping, tactile cartography, and experiments in virtual or augmented reality to explore perception under different conditions.

Applications span urban planning and design for accessibility and livability, landscape management, cultural heritage, tourism, and disaster response. For example, researchers investigate how street noise affects wayfinding, how smells shape place attachment, or how tactile cues aid navigation for blind or low-vision users. Data can be qualitative, such as narratives of sensory experience, or quantitative, such as sensor-derived measurements of sound or air quality tied to locations.

Critiques address subjectivity, cross-cultural variability, and methodological challenges in measuring sensory data. Proponents argue that sensegeography enriches traditional cartography by foregrounding lived experience and multisensory dimensions of place while supporting inclusive, human-centered approaches to space.