Christina Agapakis writes in the Oscillator blog:
The unique smell of a city is something that my Synthetic Aesthetics partner, Sissel Tolaas, has been interested in for a long time. Yesterday in her lab I got to smell her recreations of the smells of Paris–the corner bakery, dog poop on the sidewalk, old rusty cars, cigarettes and perfume, sun on the street after heavy rain.
She’s analyzed the smells of several cities, creating scratch-and sniff maps of Mexico City, beautiful perfume bottles filled with the smell of Berlin neighborhoods, and smell profiles of cities as different as Vienna and Kansas City….
(Thanks to investigator Roland Land for bringing this to our attention.)