sensing cities
Today’s nerdy academic business is the role of sensescapes in Singapore and their transnational applicability. I’m excited because sensescapes is basically a fancy way for us to talk about the racism embodied in things like complaining about smells from restaurants, about noisy cultural celebrations, about people hanging out together. I’ve learnt this academic way to describe a thing that I think is really significant and has a large impact in Australia (and in Singapore). It’s what underpins when people in Melbourne complain about Indigenous people hanging out but don’t complain about 7 hour parties in parks. It’s about what makes people feel comfortable or uncomfortable. It’s SUPER INTERESTING, and I think it has a real impact on how people interact with climate change and sustainability messages.
In the immediate future it’s about a demarcation of urban spaces and how we do that, and who has a right to use a space. It’s got colonial underpinnings, too, in how our colonisers demanded to use our spaces and demanded how we used our spaces (and removed ourselves from our spaces).
Apart from being assailed by odors for which the Chinese were responsible due to their use of manure to cultivate gardens (‘Odors’, 1875), they have also been held culpable for other sensory breaches that included noise generated by the ‘banging of gongs and tom-toms’ in the district of Tanjong Katong (‘Chinese District’, 1912). Similar to the stench emanating from Chinese gardens, gong banging had been interpreted as a willful and intentional act meant to cause ‘great annoyance to protesting Europeans residing a few yards away from the ‘‘music’’’ (‘Chinese District’, 1912). Such sensory intensity that occurs in this context (compare Vannini et al., 2012) is unwelcomed as it disrupts the sensory order of residential space. Furthermore, sensory breaches engender highly charged emotions (compare Smith, 2006), thereby rendering overt discrimination against such sources of breach.
Right now it has a lot to do with how we categorise people and control spaces. It has to do with gentrification and immigration and the other.
In addition, a Nigerian soccer player narrated his experience of being regarded as olfactorily questionable: “Mr Matthew Okonkwu, 24, a Nigerian footballer who has been in Singapore for three weeks, recounted an instance when a woman pinched her nose and shot him a dirty look as they passed each other on the street. He said: ‘She could not have smelled me from that distance, and besides, I had just showered!’” These various examples demonstrate that residents claim urban spaces which ought to be demarcated from foreign others. Such space is also assumed to come with a measure of sensory order instead of disturbances emanating from foreigners.
So I’ve been reading the work of Kelvin EY Low, who’s a lecturer at NUS. Specifically these quotes come from Sensing cities: the politics of migrant sensescapes, which I’ve been thinking about a lot the last day or two. This is still a brand new concept to me (obviously) so I’m still feeling my way around it. If you’re familiar with this concept let me know your recommendations for my further reading!
Ethnographically it’s interesting that he’s conducted ‘walking surveys’ of places to gauge how people interact with sensory landscapes.
As we proceeded from Tekka Centre towards a foodcourt across the road, Caitlin immediately pointed out the ‘Indian food smell’ which for her, ‘it’s very hard ... to ... differentiate between the smell of Indian food and smell of Indians, because ... they are both moving into one’ (p. 105). She further explained that as Indians consume a lot of curry, they therefore smelled like what they ate. Caitlin remarked: ‘To put it brutally, they are very smelly, the place stinks! I don’t like. And the people here stare. It unnerves me’
(This latter quote is from The sensuous city: Sensory methodologies in urban ethnographic research)
The concept of sensory rights can also be applied to things like “amenity”, when people move into areas like Fitzroy and then complain about the late night noise or say things NIMBY things like “Wind farms are okay but not anywhere near me.” And we’re obviously seeing those things, and they’re having an impact on how communities interact with sustainability and climate change. And that’ll become more significant and intense.
