Food, Senses, and Urban Transformation: Contemporary Sensory Ethnography of Istanbul’s Gustatory Landscape

This article examined how the temporal rhythms and changing sensory composition of Galata and Karaköy’s foodscape reveal urban transformation through everyday gustatory and olfactory experience. Although sensory ethnography has expanded understandings of embodied urban experience, it remains unevenly developed, with gustatory and olfactory urban experiences often overlooked. The study adopted a multi-phased sensewalking , combining sensory mapping , participant observation, photography, and in situ interviewing. The approach captured embodied, in-motion, and real-time encounters with food-related smells, taste associations, and culinary practices, enabling analysis of how gustatory and olfactory urban experiences are spatially and temporally organised. The findings demonstrated that the urban foodscape operated through a gustatory rhythm, structured across the day through shifting sensory dimensions. The processes of transformation reconfigured the gustatory landscape, producing a built environment in which traditional culinary practices coexist with, and are sometimes displaced by, global and contemporary food cultures. The study contributed to the fields of sensory ethnography and urban studies methodologically and theoretically. It demonstrated how sensewalking and open-ended sensory mapping can produce situated ethnographic accounts of foodscape transformation. The discussion foregrounded the gustatory and olfactory dimensions of sensory placemaking, food culture, and culinary heritage, suggesting how urban transformation is experienced through changing food-related smells, taste associations, practices, and temporal rhythms.