Jennifer Kitson

This article explores hydrophilia, humans’ affective ties with water, through the development of a public storytelling methodology for exploring fluvial senses of place and expanding the fluvial imagination through the art of listening. This ‘watershed storytelling’ methodology was developed at the confluence of public cultural geographies, the environmental humanities, and oral history in response to calls for greater aesthetic engagement with fluvial landscapes and more inclusive ways of doing oral environmental history. In the absence of tangible bodies of water, we suggest that dialogic listening spaces can generate moments of perceptible feelings of connection, to others and place, through water. We call this affective event a ‘hydrophilic encounter,’ we believe it can open empathic capacities to feel, sense, and imagine our interconnectedness through water and place. We share this methodology as one route to publicly facilitate hydrophilic encounters, inviting readers to replicate and adapt this public geography practice within diverse communities interested in engaging public sentiments on the importance of water within regional and global contexts.

In the last two decades, urban planners have embraced digital technologies to complement traditional public participation processes; research on the impact of smarter digital instruments, such as immersive virtual reality (IVR), however, is scant. We recruited 40 focus group participants to explore various formats of spatial planning scenario simulations in Glassboro, NJ, USA. Our study finds that the level of participation, memory recalls of scenarios, and emotional responses to design proposals are higher with multi-sensory and multi-dimensional IVR simulations than with standard presentations such as 2D videos of 3D model simulations, coupled with verbal presentations. We also discuss the limitations of IVR technology to assist urban planning practitioners in evaluating its potential in their own participatory planning efforts.

Odor annoyance negatively impacts residents of communities adjacent to persistent nuisance industries. These residents, often with a high percentage of minority or otherwise marginalized residents, experience subjective and objective impacts on health and well-being; yet, reliable methods for quantifying and categorizing odors have been elusive. Field olfactometry is integral to the study of odor annoyance experienced by communities as it includes both qualitative (human perception) and quantitative (intensity measurement) dimensions of human odor experience and has been employed by municipalities in the U.S. to evaluate odor pollution levels. Cartographic visualization of odor data recorded using a field olfactometer offers further opportunity to evaluate potential patterns of odor annoyance, yet the use of field olfactometry and geographic information systems have not been frequently employed by geographers. By employing a mixed-methods approach to evaluate odor pollution, this study addresses the environmental justice context by quantifying and categorizing the presence of odor pollution in Waterfront South, a neighborhood in Camden, NJ previously identified for its disproportionate malodor burden. This study offers support to mixed methods research and the need for monitoring subjective and objective impacts in communities with compounding odor nuisance industries.

We conceive olfaction as a sense of the elemental—a term encompassing odors and the organs that detect them. Contributing to efforts in elemental thinking, we enlist olfactory attunement as a sensual and speculative mode of aesthetic orientation, an analytical frame for attending to scented matter(s) in the air. Moving in malodorous urban airs of the American Northeast, we encounter new technologies and techniques for curating scented bodies and micro air spaces, fueled by the secretive Fragrance & Flavor (F&F) industry. The F&F industry is creating and promoting “natural” and “pleasurable” scents and atmospheres that impress and inhabit bodies, creating an affective economy that summons, seduces, and habituates moods and memories. We expose the expressive infrastructure of aesthetic capitalism in the realm of olfaction using examples of new digital technologies in transmitting and exercising personalized proprietary scents: AireSpa®, Cyrano by Vapor Communications, and Aroma Gym™, a smell art installation. Operating beneath the radar but in tandem with wellness and the smell arts, digital scenting technologies are manipulating and, ultimately, diminishing the most primal of our environmental senses. We call for olfactory experiments in the “wildlands” of scent, both fair and foul, arguing that olfactory attunements, as artful science and practice, are imperative for multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

A variety of factors shape environmental policy and governance (EPG) processes, from perceptions of physical ecology and profit motives to social justice and concerns with landscape aesthetics. Many scholars have examined the role of values in EPG, and demonstrated that attempts to incorporate (especially) non-market values into EPG are loaded with both practical and conceptual challenges. Nevertheless, it is clear that non-market values of all types play a crucial role in shaping EPG outcomes. In this article we explore the role of nostalgia as a factor in EPG. We examine literatures on environmental values, governance and affect in light of their relationships with environmental policymaking, first as a means to decide whether or not nostalgia can be rightly described as an ‘environmental value’. We suggest that, from a philosophical perspective, nostalgia is by itself environmentally neutral, and is not usefully described as a ‘value’. However, as an emotional state that longs to preserve or recover something of the past – whether fading or no longer present – that is fondly remembered, nostalgia does represent a potentially strong ‘motivator’ for EPG decisions. Despite this somewhat ambivalent assessment of nostalgia as an environmental value, we argue that nostalgia and nostalgic longing to return to ‘better’ or ‘cleaner’ environments can lead to potentially significant impacts on ecosystems and landscapes, both positive and negative depending on what it is that people want to preserve or restore. Thus we conclude that we neglect understanding the role of nostalgia in EPG at our peril: first, because preservationist goals have always been an important part of environmental responsibility; and second, because many people will be swayed regarding environmental action through a mobilisation of nostalgia by political leaders and interest groups alike. We end our article with suggestion of avenues for further empirical investigation.

Heat is an inescapable cosmological force. This thought experiment radiates around thinking thermal sensations as elemental intensities, “beings” in themselves, always moving through bodies, objects, and things, perpetually affecting and producing effects. Using infrared thermography and embracing a critical-aesthetics approach, we ignite thermal sensations, moving through the infernal city of Phoenix and the Arizona–Sonora borderlands. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze are primary interlocutors in a sci-phi experiment that unfolds across two thermal imaginaries as movements in thought: (1) stranger things, and (2) desert of the real. This is our necessary passage from mysterious enchantments and curiosities felt in the thermal flesh of the world, stranger things, to the violence of thermal sensations in the desert of the real—human remains, migrant bodies, and the marginalized bearing traces of injury and injustice in the inferno where we live every day. Burning the flesh of the world helps render visible (sensate) the catastrophe of the present. There can be no resistance, no counteractualizations, and no sci-phi imaginaries of peoples and worlds to come, in the absence of thermal sensations touching, affecting, and moving all bodies of this earth.

This paper twins theories of urbanism and feminist hospitality in exploring the practice of historic home touring as demonstrative of hospitable urbanism, an ethical opening of self and neighborhood to strangers. In Phoenix, Arizona, the quintessential “ahistorical” sprawling metropolis, historic home touring is particularly evocative. With 35 residential historic districts covering much of the central city, Phoenix boasts an entire home tour season each spring. I consider the opening of private homes to the public a gesture of urban welcome critical in tempering the exclusionary tendencies of historic districts. Such seemingly minor practices are increasingly perceived as consequential in generating (or foreclosing) lived community amid difference (gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, migration status, religion, etc.). Without striving toward openness, vulnerability, and inclusion, urban communities risk becoming shuttered, sterile, and disconnected from public life. However brief or atmospheric, a gesture of urban welcome requires the consideration of strangers in the first place.

Efforts to remedy existential anxiety and the sense of ‘homelessness’ permeating modern life invariably invoke ideas and practices swirling around dwelling and nostalgia. Geographies probing the materiality of loss and memory have elaborated and critiqued nostalgia in both regressive and progressive postures. We argue that amorphous and sensual qualities of nostalgia make it a propulsive force in dwelling. Moving beyond nostalgia as a representation of, or personal longing for, ‘the past’ or ‘home’, we engage historic practice as transpersonal, affective currents coursing through bodies, objects, and things. Nostalgia is an enchantment with distance that cannot be bridged. We explore nostalgic distance vis-a-vis practices in residential historic preservation in the Coronado district in Phoenix, Arizona. Practice, performance, and materiality of historic inhabitation illuminate nostalgic distance as an undertow in the making of historic sensibilities, subjectivities, and places. The elusiveness of nostalgia whispers enchantments, engendering attentiveness to what is near, to sensing closely. Nostalgic practice, performance, and materiality give rise to an everyday aesthetic of pastness, an embodied ethics of care rather than strict adherence to historic preservation codes and guidelines. We contribute to rethinking nostalgia and residential historic preservation as modes of sensing in which all bodies, objects, and things – human–nonhuman, animate–inanimate – have capacities to affect and to be affected.