What does lockdown smell like? Understanding the COVID-19 pandemic through smell

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to understandings of COVID society by offering insights into the lived experience of lockdown. It reveals how larger social and economic impacts of the virus unfold in one suburban town in New Zealand. Employing “smellwalks,” it mobilizes smell as an empirical tool to understand lockdown experience. Drawing from the “sensory turn” this method recognizes smell as a way of knowing social existence and gleaning non-discursive and embodied insights into the global pandemic. This paper endeavors to develop sensory methodology within urban sociology by revealing how smell furthers understandings of place and modes of being during lockdown. It argues changes in suburban smells signal disruption to daily life as a result of the government’s social and economic pandemic-response measures. For instance, the empty cold smell of the mall usually warm and bustling with activity, conveys the isolation and loss of social connectedness produced by lockdown restrictions. Similarly, the dry smell of concrete dust created by the closure and demolition of a high-street bank reflects the slowing of the national economy. Attention to smell enables insight into new modes of being for residents that involve heightened anxiety around viral contagion and a slower, quieter, environmentally cleaner way of life.