In a community gathering last night featuring a walking tour of an older urban neighborhood, a woman attending commented that she noticed the fresh fragrances of the many gardens along the way. Her remarks casually represented the palpable quality of the air in urban core neighborhoods as normative, citing comparisons to the sanitized air in suburban neighborhoods.
The same is certainly true in my thriving urban core neighborhood. I counted scores of unique smells and scents on a recent half-hour sidewalk spring stroll.
It was an interesting insider observation that people in this diverse group agreed with. The power of her statements smacks of the perceptions otherwise that suburbanites often have of their geourban counterparts.
The whole experience speaks to how we design neighborhoods for the most basic aesthetics like the palpability of scents and smells from walkways.