For architecture student Pia Wright, it's easy to tell the time of day and where she is in Manly simply by following her nose.
Saturday night "stinks of cigarettes and alcohol and people going out", while on a Sunday morning the smell of coffee or salty sweat from people jogging wafts through the air.
She is part of a new course at the University of Technology Sydney taking an unconventional approach to mapping.
Students have spent weeks remapping a number of Sydney suburbs according to smell, touch, sound, taste and sight.
"The task given to the students was to delve into this realm of creative cartography," Associate Professor Nimish Biloria said.
"The whole idea of [it is] understanding space that you actually inhabit, your everyday living space, through the means of sensory perception."
Colour-coded sensory maps
Students walked the streets of Manly, Newtown, Surry Hills and Pyrmont recording various sensations and their intensity, then sorted them into categories such as humans, transport and nature, and plotted the results on maps with colour-coded marks.
Unlike static roads and streets, the sensory maps change dramatically depending on the day of the week and time of day.
"Everything sensory changes between that eight or nine hours to Sunday morning," Ms Wright said.
"In the morning, it smells quite sterile on [Manly] wharf because … they're cleaning from the night before.
"When it rains, you get that really muddy scent everywhere."
Useful tool for planners and tourists
Relying on standard line maps to navigate through a city, especially on foot, was problematic, Associate Professor Biloria said.
"The problem is that everything is about travelling from A to B in the shortest possible time … but nobody is talking about actually what happens within that A and B," he said.
"Are there spaces that are much quieter? Are there spaces that are much more contemplative? Are there spaces which are actually healthy for me that I can navigate?"
He said city planners and designers were focused on land use and physical aspects.
"Nobody talks about how people actually feel within those spaces," Associate Professor Biloria said.
"And I think this dimension is really critical, planners can actually learn in terms of how their planning policies are influencing human emotions."
For someone new to the city, the sensory maps give a better indication of the best places to go.
"Imagine a tourist only seeing a map which talks about what are zones are of heightened activities versus actually what are zones which are quiet and contemplative."
Barking dogs, car fumes and barbed wire
In Pyrmont — a mix of industrial, commercial and residential zones — students mapped touch, sound and smell.
Rough, hard surfaces occurred in industrial zones, while softer, natural textures were found in parks or streets with houses.
Barking dogs were found where the textures were soft and natural, while car fumes were strongest around hard surfaces.
Where Jack Shields found a fence topped with barbed wire — recorded as a sharp, hostile texture — it was accompanied by an electrical hum.
"Even though it was on a residential street, in comparison to other residential streets, there wasn't much activity around it," he said.
So, how do you represent these senses visually on a map?
"Smell is wispy, it can be either aromatic or pungent while taste is more sporadic and in the moment," said student Christina Crosling.
After collecting their data, students experimented with watercolours of varying intensity, coloured dots of different sizes and other techniques to illustrate their findings.
The results often rendered the traditional street map unnecessary.
"You can actually see the main streets without even seeing the map, just because the sensations have mapped that," Ms Crosling said.
Try it yourself
Associate Professor Boloria encouraged people to pay more attention to what they were hearing, smelling, touching, tasting and seeing when they were out.
"We completely forget to deploy our own sensors to the fullest in order to understand what are we actually experiencing within this particular place and time itself."
Aishling Cohen enjoyed that aspect of the research as she tuned into the sounds of Manly.
"It was actually really nice and interesting to hear the sounds that usually I wouldn't hear," she said.
"Being able to tune into the sound of the ocean a lot more was really calming and soothing, and really made me appreciate Manly."
Gerald Tam became much more aware of his emotional response to what he saw around him from tension created by traffic to the calming effect of a quiet afternoon at the beach.
"Reflecting [on] the kind of laid-back environment Manly, I think it would be best for during the day … to be relatively calm, comfortable with nothing overly stressful or tense."
