City Maps Drawn on the Senses
MINNEAPOLIS — James Boyd-Brent leaned off the curb into blaring downtown traffic and poked his nose toward his idea of a tourist attraction: the sewer grate at 7th and Nicollet.
He was rewarded with a whiff of pure nastiness -- a belching-diesel, rotting-garbage, backed-up-port-a-potty smell that condensed the essence of urban underbelly into one throat-clogging blast.
The college professor inhaled with gusto.
"If you get close like this, it's really disgusting!" he called, delighted.
Then he raced off to breathe in the pepper-spiked autumn-bonfire scent of the Kramarczuk Sausage Co.
Both the sewer and the sausage deli are stops on a Twin Cities "smell tour" that Boyd-Brent put together with fellow professors at the University of Minnesota. They identified 50 distinctive odors in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Now they want their neighbors to start sniffing.
The university's Design Institute will release "Odorama: A Smell Map" today as part of a quirky initiative to provoke a community conversation about urban life. Funded by a $1-million grant from Target Corp., the project aims to get people thinking about how their cities are designed, how that design affects their lives -- and how they can push for better urban planning.
Events include a five-day road race this week through Twin Cities neighborhoods, a summer Design Camp for teens, and the sale of nine offbeat maps, including "Odorama," that invite the public to explore an urban kaleidoscope of smells, sounds, tastes and colors.
A garden map leads to a plot of heirloom tomatoes tended by deaf Hmong immigrants. A spiritual map points to a freshwater spring, sacred to Native Americans, burbling in a grove hung with offerings of dried tobacco. A map devoted to the grain industry traces a path from farm to silo to mill to the fortune cookie factory on Minnehaha Avenue.
When familiar landmarks make it onto the maps, it's with a twist: The Mall of America is listed not for its extravagant shopping, but for the sharp, astringent smell of the chlorinated log-flumeride that circles through the vast lobby.
Each map works almost "like a palate cleanser at a meal between courses, like when someone serves you a delicious fennel sorbet. It reboots your perspective," said Janet Abrams, the director of the Design Institute. "You'll see what's always been there, but you'll notice it differently."
