Rust, Dust, Smoke and Smell: Memoryscapes for Industrial Heritage

The sensory aspects of heritage can be elusive, with the fugitive nature of the dimension of smell, and with the ephemerality of tactile changes to surfaces, and the overall temporal mutability of the landscape. Memoryscape is a multi-sensory approach that promotes the act of remembering and bodily experience in a landscape. Industrial heritage possesses important cultural and historical values and worth remembering, yet heritage design practice has been focused on the visual and neglected the non-visual aspects of the landscape. This article explores how smell and materials can enhance a bodily experience at post-industrial landscapes through three cases in New Zealand: Shantytown Heritage Park, Dunedin Warehouse Precinct and The Tannery. The results illustrate how olfactory and ephemeral materials infuse heritage landscapes with vivid connections to the past, but are often overlooked in professional framings of heritage. Traditional perspectives on heritage, especially in formal settings like museums, eliminate elements such as smell and dust as they are seen as phenomena of decay. Professionals, such as landscape architects, are predominantly ocularcentric in their practice, and the potential of multi-sensory approaches can be overlooked. In the context of industrial heritage, these olfactory and ephemeral qualities are not necessarily pleasant, and this further contributes to their being neglected in the treatment of heritage sites.