Smell in the City: Smoking and Olfactory Politics

Abstract

This paper explores smoking in the city as a sensorially transgressive practice that leads to the generation of sensuous ‘effluent’. An assessment of the relevant literature on tobacco control and urban geography reveals that it is very much sensorially sterile. Accordingly, it is hoped to redress this gap by being attentive to how a smoking related olfactory politics manifests itself in Singapore. By teasing out the embodied sensations that sensuous urban encounters between smokers and non-smokers can elicit, the paper argues that stigmatising sensory impressions of moral defilement are often (‘legitimately’) ascribed onto bodies emitting and reeking of cigarette smoke. Alongside this, the paper demonstrates how these unflattering sensory impressions can have implications for the segregation of smokers in public spaces. As a consequence of such socio-spatial stratifications of odorous bodies, some strategies of impression management are outlined that smokers adopt so as to fashion a more palatable moral and olfactory presentation of the self. Finally, the paper concludes with some thoughts on nurturing new sensory responses as a means of coping with urban diversity.

1. Introduction: Towards a Sensory Urbanism

It has been argued that the significance of sensory registers in moulding urban experiences has received scant attention from urban scholars. Thus, I situate this paper in a burgeoning body of work known as sensory urbanism, one that strives to open up bold and refreshing avenues for sensing the city. By detailing the socio-spatial contestations between smokers and non-smokers in Singapore, I argue that an attunement to the olfactory politics of cigarette smoke/smoking reveals much about the segregation and stratification of (quasi-)public urban spaces. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the scholarship on urban geography by rehabilitating the phenomenological sensecapes of city living.

The disciplining of sensory practices features prominently in cities and several scholars have bemoaned the progressive sensorial deprivation of these urban spaces, where

harsh sensations are kept at bay by the regulation of extraneous sensory intrusions and the production of moderated soundscapes, tactilities, smellscapes and scenes (Edensor, 2007, p. 219; see also Adams and Guy, 2007).

In the 18th century, foetid smells were already strongly associated with miasma, infection and decay. And as illness and death were thought to travel through air—strategies such as the avoidance of overcrowding and the creation of spatial distance were adopted to ensure proper air circulation, which in turn allowed odours to dissipate quickly (Corbin, 1986; Degen, 2008; Chiang, 2008; Mitchell, 2011). By the 19th century, foul smells were not just indicators of disease, they were also linked to the backwardness, filth and misery that plagued the working classes. Since then, the deodorisation and ventilation of public spaces have been fixed firmly on the agenda of urban planners, to rid (largely Anglo-American) cities of the ‘stench’ of poverty and incivility.

However, even in tightly governed cities, sensory disruptions take place and one way to extend a multisensorial appreciation of urban spaces is to be sensitive to how ‘difference’ is performed through “encompassing field[s] of everyday sociality and sensual habit” thereby “colour[ing] the visual, flavour[ing] the olfactory and temper[ing] the emotional” (Haldrup et al., 2006, p. 177; Low, 2012). Whereas academics have begun to explore quotidian encounters with sensorially transgressive bodies (Rogerson and Rice, 2009; Sharma, 2011), little has been said about how smokers, as purveyors of sensory pollution, reconfigure (quasi-) public spaces with their presence. In particular, urban geographers have rarely considered how olfactory perceptions of second/third-hand smoke as malicious, malignant and malevolent reproduce inter-corporeal distances between smokers and non-smokers. It is thus this gap that this paper attempts to fill.

The rest of this paper is organised into six parts. The next section is a review of relevant strands of work. The third section documents the sensory methodologies that I have undertaken, while the fourth section presents the urban context of the study. Section 5 delves into how an olfactory politics affects the arrangement of smoking and non-smoking in public places. Section 6 looks at how smokers negotiate their subjectivities as odiferous others by employing techniques of scent-orship, so as to reposition themselves as considerate people. Section 7 concludes with how this paper extends the work on sensory urbanism beyond its current mould.

2. A Scent-sual Urban Politics

Geographers have long identified how transgressive bodily practices are likely to be rendered (sensually) out of place (Sibley, 1995; Cresswell, 1996). This notion of people ‘out of place’ can be traced back to the insights of Douglas’s (1966) anthropological work on Purity and Danger as well as Kristeva’s writing (1982) on Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Many geographers have borrowed these ideas and have illustrated the geographies of displacement undergone by groups of people deemed as ‘risky’, ‘defiled’ and ‘diseased’. Some examples include attempts to eradicate HIV-positive patients (Craddock, 2000) and drug users (Malins et al., 2006), so as to eliminate undesirable sensory experiences. Indeed, various technologies have been employed to differentiate ‘unhygienic’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies that do not conform to the prevailing sensory regime as ‘outsiders’. While these geographers have identified the overlaps between perceived unhealthiness and exclusion, there has been overwhelming preoccupation with an ocularcentric apprehension and surveillance of public space (Cook and Whowell, 2011). This privileging of the visual discounts how other sensory modalities such as olfaction intersect with discourses of pathology and function as factors contributing to one’s sensual-spatial disenfranchisement.

2.1 Smelling Difference

It has been argued that the sense of smell is a boundary and distance-maintaining socio-spatial phenomenon differentiating individuals from one another. Academics have also stated that smell can be especially insidious because it encroaches upon bodily spaces, “penetrat[ing] so to speak, in a gaseous form, into our most sensory inner being”, thereby making apparent the vulnerability of these corporeal boundaries (Simmel, 1997, p. 109; Synnott, 1991, 1993; Terranova, 2007). Curtis (2008, p. 11) similarly notes that “every person projects odour into the area immediately around them, and this odour is invasive”. In addition, they have written about the moral inflection of olfaction. This is because olfactory repugnance is often conflated with moral repugnance; hence malodours are typically associated with moral laxity. Further, olfactory norms are easily justified by discourses of health and cleanliness. For this reason, olfactory pollution has to be removed in order to sustain a sanitised social space, thereby fostering notions of sensory discrimination. Such a view resonates with Classen’s (1992, p. 136) assertion that “sensory values not only frame a culture’s experience, they express its ideals, its hopes and its fears”.

With an understanding of side-stream/secondhand/environmental-tobacco-smoke as physically harmful, campaigns to denormalise smoking has been revitalised by an ethic that exhorts people to ‘do with your own body whatever you like, but you may not expose others to risks which they do not agree to take on themselves’. Such efforts at ‘denormalisation’ strive to change popular perceptions of smoking as an accepted behaviour by making explicit use of urban space as a political tool to prohibit certain acts in certain places. Accordingly, the smoker in public space is construed as “the most selfish animal imaginable” not just because s/he is “contaminating the pure and fragrant air” but also because s/he is now a producer of air-borne carcinogens (Dunning and Mennell, 2003, p. 213). A public smoking ban thus works to isolate smokers from non-smokers, in order to protect the rights of non-smokers to clean and healthy air space. Health sociologists and public health commentators have contributed to a voluminous body of work documenting how smoking denormalisation has led to the stigmatisation of smokers by reifying them as irresponsible vectors of disease (Kim and Shanahan, 2003; Bayer and Stuber, 2006). Key debates have been crystallised around whether it is ethical for public health policies to promote stigma as “an arbitrary and cruel form of social control” and whether stigma is actually effective in achieving the goal of smoking cessation (Burris, 2008, p. 475). Although the United Kingdom’s National Health Service has started employing the rhetoric of ‘if you smoke, you stink’ (Voigt, forthcoming), explications of how smokers are prone to sensory discrimination are sorely absent in the existing literature.

Meanwhile, health scholars have deployed the concept of spatial purification to document smokers’ and non-smokers’ contested claims to public space (Bell et al., 2010; Ritchie et al., 2010). They have looked into the sequestering of smoking bodies into designated (quasi-)public smoking spaces and how this commonly engenders what Goffman (1963) calls the ‘mortification of the self’ because of his/her heightened visibility (Poland, 1998; Fischer and Poland, 1998; Poland et al., 1999). These feelings of mortification are amplified in (quasi-)public spheres due to the presence of a critical public gaze. These academics have also implied that such a (b)ordering practice is reminiscent of a spatial apartheid, albeit one that is carried out in the name of public health. Such smoke-free zones operate to reinforce a certain olfactory homogeneity and hegemony, even though smoke and smell cannot be fully annihilated (Classen et al., 1994). Further, as malodourous others, smokers tend to provoke an affective response from others.

2.2 Olfactory Affects

Sensual appraisals are not just signifying, they are also profoundly caught up in sensual affects. Scholars have evinced that bodies that smell often stir up visceral sensations like repulsion and disgust. Drobnick (2006b, p. 1) terms this fearful threat invoked by particular odours ‘odourphobia’. Olfaction therefore, becomes “a prominent excuse for expressions of xenophobia [and] being odorous is tantamount to being odious”. Scholars have also expounded on how ‘revolting’ smells are seemingly ‘natural’, but they do not simply happen in a social-spatial vacuum (Law, 2001).

Drobnick (2006a, p. 2) astutely identifies that the public furore surrounding secondhand smoke gestures towards an elevated awareness of the physiological potency of smells. The ‘foul’ smells of secondhand smoke effectively inflame anxieties over air and olfactory contamination. King James I’s Counterblaste to Tobacco, although written in 1604, reflects a sensory-affective inclination towards smokers that is still highly relevant today. Smoking was portrayed as a deplorable practice assaulting almost all the senses: “[Smoking is] a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs” (Burns, 2007, p. 46). It is thus unsurprising that cigarette smoke often triggers touch-and-recoil responses from non-smokers. The next section proceeds to sketch out the sensory methodological routes that I have undertaken for this study.

3. Sensory Methodologies

I sought to understand olfactory relations by adopting Pink’s (2009) work on sensory ethnography and focused on the multisensorial experiences of being in the field. While the term ‘sensory’ often meant senses other than vision, I did not take it that way, as various sensory registers worked in concert with one another. Rather, I tried to attune to sensory registers that overlapped in complex ways. These ways of knowing highlight smoking worlds that are sensed, not just seen. Likewise, Feld and Basso (1996, p. 91) put this idea across cleverly: “place is sensed, senses are placed; as places make sense, senses make place”.

During ethnographic visits to smoking sites which were identified based on the presence of ash-trays and cigarette butts. I took note of smoking activities, as well as their spatial arrangement. I also tried to be sensitive to the auras, moods and affects hanging in the air (Anderson, 2009) and made a record of this information in a field diary. My field sites encompassed quasi-public spaces including indoor smoking rooms, outdoor smoking seats and public spaces including open air smoking corners.

I conducted semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with two groups of participants from August 2011 to February 2012. The first group consisted of 50 smokers, with a good mix in terms of gender, class, race and religion. These respondents were young adult smokers, 18 to 29 years old, who were mainly students and young professionals. I chose to focus on young Singaporean smokers because, according to the National Health Survey published by the Ministry of Health (2010), smoking is most common (16.3 per cent) among this age bracket. However, the voices of these young Singaporean smokers were strangely absent from state discourses and academic research.

By the term ‘smoker’, I meant individuals who smoked cigarettes (machine-rolled/hand-rolled). I have not dealt with other types of tobacco consumption like the use of cigars. I understood smoking as a bodily enactment and/or a category of identification, and that my respondents who were ‘smokers’ were not a homogeneous group of people, in terms of their smoking practices. Therefore, it was necessary to employ a smoking typology (ex-smoker, regular smoker, social smoker, lapsed smoker) to ensure that a good range of smokers had been selected for this study. Nonetheless, I understand that these representational categories are neither discrete, mutually exclusive nor immutable; rather, they overlap and evolve over space and time.

Additionally, I requested for ethnographic walk-along sessions with smokers as they went about their smoking breaks. I asked if their smoking routines were more or less fixed and whether the smoking points that they brought me to were their regular haunts. I observed their subtle bodily gestures and dispositions as they lit up a cigarette and puffed, as well as how and where they did so. Although these elusively “quick and lively [smoking] geographies” (Bondi, 2005, p. 438) did not always keep still for my detailed inspection and documentation enabled me to witness my respondents’ performances of the smoking act, rather than just relying on accounts of what they did.

These walk-along sessions gave me a glimpse into how smokers were emplaced in their sensual-spatial world and reminded me that my research was a relational, rather than a solo accomplishment. These quotidian (inter)actions enrolled the competencies, sensibilities and expertise of both researcher and researched, thereby challenging traditional assumptions of the researcher as an expert, authoritative, and above all, dispassionate voice. Engaging in sensorial ethnography heightened my vulnerabilities and limitations as a researcher. Although I have empathy for my smoking respondents, as a non-smoker, it is frustrating not to know what a cigarette-stained embodiment feels like. These affective spaces of research need to be articulated in academic texts in order to put the spotlight on the researcher’s body as “a site of scholarly awareness and corporeal literacy” (Spry, 2001, p. 706).

The second group comprised 10 non-smokers. This was to allow me to reach a better understanding of the interactions between smokers and non-smokers. Valentine (2010) reminds us that there is a need to find out how prejudice towards the ‘minority’ (smokers) is being expressed and justified by the majority (non-smokers), rather than merely carrying out a one-sided study on the ‘minority’. This would also help me to compare how smokers and non-smokers experience space(s). The first few points of entry for the recruitment of respondents were from my personal contacts. The rest were snowballed via word-of-mouth. Interviews were conducted at a place convenient to the respondents and the interview transcripts were coded according to recurring themes.

Informed by Massumi’s (2002, p. 62) assertion that “affect contaminates empirical space through language”, I was sensitive to “extra-linguistic elements of communication”. Hence, I noted the corporeal dispositions of my smoking respondents. They tended to hold and pull on their cigarettes diagonally across from me, as well as ensuring that they exhaled smoke away from me. These acts reflected their intentions to be considerate smokers. I also observed facial cues and ‘sonic inflections’ that were infused with intonations, amplitudes, disharmonies and silences that took place during the shared spaces of these interviews (Kanngieser, 2012, p. 337). Moreover, while some of my respondents were struggling to articulate themselves, others mobilised much “evocative vocabulary” in re-enacting sensual-affectual memories (Mason and Davies, 2009, p. 595). Therefore, vocal utterances were important for us to enter into a spatiality of listening and sounding, which can be conduits for the transmission of sensual-affective currents between the interviewer and the interviewed. These corporeal-aural spaces of interviewing revealed much about smokers’ affective complexities of being and feeling stigmatised. Moving on, I paint a brief background of Singapore, the urban context from which I have gathered my empirical data.

4. The Urban Context: Singapore

Singapore, an urbanised city-state, together with other countries, have been involved in a transnational initiative spearheaded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) pressing for smoke-free public places (The Straits Times, 2008). In this section, I trace the increasingly restrictive smoking landscape in Singapore from the 1970s to the present along two strands of development. First, the focus of the smoking ban initially hinged on the notion of civic consciousness before it shifted its emphasis to protecting the health of non-smokers. Secondly, the smoking ban has been progressively extended to include even open-air, outdoor public places.

As a highly controlled urban environment, the Smoking (Prohibition in Certain Places) Act in Singapore was first implemented in 1970. It preceded health concerns surrounding the risks of secondhand smoke. Prior to the US Surgeon General’s Report in 1986, smoking was considered a purely social-aesthetic issue, rather than a health-related one (Koh et al., 1994). Smoking was prohibited for safety and hygiene reasons as lit cigarette butts were deemed as fire hazards. The ash generated was also “recognized as a source of haze, eye irritation and unpleasant odours” (Tan et al., 2000, p. 1003).

By the late 1980s, smoking-control programmes had begun to urge smokers to be more gracious towards non-smokers. The Smoking Control Committee (SCC) saw its objective as “educat[ing] Singaporeans on their right to insist on clean air” and to make them “more enthusiastic [about] demanding a smoke-free environment” so that they could deter smokers from violating smoke-free policies ( The Straits Times, 1996, 1999). Such exhortations caused the Tobacco Association of Singapore to call for attitudes that were more accommodating towards smokers, to which the SCC responded by stating that its role was to alert the public to the dangers of passive smoking rather than the reproduction of a discourteous environment between smokers and non-smokers.

In the 1990s, the emphasis was shifted towards guarding the health of the larger non-smoking population, particularly in enclosed places where smoke would have problems escaping and where the non-smoker would not be able to avoid it. Eventually, the Ministry’s intent is to remove the need for an exhaustive list and allow smoking only in private premises and designated areas. In keeping to such an aim, the state continued extending the scope of the ban over the years ( The Straits Times, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011). In July 2006, open-air indoor and outdoor food centres were only allowed to designate 10 per cent and 20 per cent of their total seating capacity as smoking areas respectively. Non-smokers were disappointed that this ‘partitioning’ of (quasi-)public spaces did little to confine the wafting smoke. In July 2007, smoking was proscribed in air-conditioned entertainment outlets, although operators could apply for a ventilated smoking room. Smoking bans in enclosed areas were clearly more effective than those outdoors. It was reported that not only were businesses not adversely affected, the ban ensured the occupational safety of bar-tenders and made clubs a more welcoming space for revellers who preferred crisper, fresher air. Since January 2009, smoking has been prohibited in public places within 5 metres of building entrances and exits.

While the state and members of the public have insisted that public smoking is ‘detrimental to the well-being of the non-smoking majority’ and is tantamount to respiratory rape, they have been silent about how an over stringent ban could breed smoking enclaves that would deepen the smoker/non-smoker divide. Nevertheless, some sympathetic non-smokers proposed that a larger health hazard and sensory disorder probably emanates from car fumes, in greater quantities than small amounts of secondhand smoke. These non-smokers have argued against an ‘anti-smoking zealotry’, as smokers have already been pushed from pillar to post, ostracised by self-righteous non-smokers who seized every chance to criticise them, even as they have taken it upon themselves to avoid inconveniencing others. Having set the context to the smoking landscape in Singapore, the next section moves into how olfactory clashes between smokers and non-smokers stratify socio-spatial relations in (quasi-)public urban spaces.

5. Olfactory Relations between Smokers and Non-smokers in the City

Sensory regimes often dictate an olfactory neutrality. Therefore, the olfactory stimulation caused by cigarette smoke almost always invites the sensory appraisal of others. This is especially the case in the context of the city, where its density means that people are often placed in close proximity with one another. The stale tinge of smoke lingering on their bodies renders them sensually out of place and gives them away as subscribers of a ‘filthy habit’ and committers of a social-sensual infraction. This opens up opportunities for olfactory discrimination which widens the socio-spatial distance between smokers and non-smokers

I was smoking along a corridor and a mother and kid came walking towards me. The mother blatantly pulled her kid away from me towards herself, and told him to cover his mouth and stop breathing for a while. [The discrimination] can be quite bad (Penny/female/Chinese/regular smoker).

As a result, smokers and non-smokers are drawn into antagonistic relations that are suffused with affective charges, the most dominant one being that of frustration

There was one time I came back from a smoke, to a group project discussion. This girl cupped her nose with her hands. What an exaggerated response! I understand that non-smokers may find the smell unbearable. But I was already polite enough to smoke away from her. I felt so indignant because she was plain rude (Willy/male/Chinese/regular smoker).

Olfactory-phobic responses from non-smokers may cause some of my smoking respondents to be apologetic about smoking in public, or to feel circumscribed and alienated because they have to retreat to more peripheral public places to smoke. However, Isabelle (female/Chinese/regular smoker) tries to re-appropriate her claims to smoking spaces in the city by expressing her exasperation at how smoke and smell disrespect spatial boundaries

People who walk into me, they’re just unlucky. I can’t control the smoke. I can’t help that they’re breathing it in. I’ve already tried to direct the smoke away from them, what else do you want me to do?

Hwee (male/Chinese/regular smoker) remarks on the futility of ‘being angry with smokers’

It’s retarded—this self-righteous anger towards smokers. These people just cannot accept the world for what it is, like Christians who’re anti-gay.

Nayak (2010, p. 2385) has written about how White young men in English suburbs legitimatise their racist stance towards Pakistanis because they are construed as “stinking[ing] of curry and shit”. Low (2009) also explains that judgements between race and smell are often made in Singapore, with stereotypical perceptions of Malay and Indian bodies as ‘stronger smelling’. Whereas it is commonly understood that ostracising others because of their ‘bodily odour’ which could be the result of their cultural practices or dietary preferences is an inappropriate thing to do, my respondents lament that most people are generally not reprimanded for stigmatising smokers

When I’m near people, they’ll sniff and sniff. I comfort myself by thinking that they’re not judging me, only the smell [of cigarette smoke]. I don’t notice the smell because I’m too used to it. The most I can do is to walk around and air out the smell. Some people don’t like the smell of durians but that doesn’t mean that I won’t eat durians, or stop someone from eating durians because they stink (Mat/male/Malay/regular smoker).

People overtaking me and fanning their hands while I’m smoking, it really gets to me! If you do that to someone with body odour, that person will slap you! (Vionna/female/Chinese/regular smoker).

Shawn’s seething remark stresses how one’s sensory habitus and bodily hexis play an integral role in both the smoker’s and non-smoker’s orientation and disorientation in public space

If you don’t like the smell, fuck off!! Those covering their mouths when they walk past me, I feel like beating them up. You won’t fucking do that to an Indian guy because he’s smelly, right? It’s fucking rude! Then why do that to a smoker? That two seconds of secondhand smoke is not going to kill you, please! A lot of people tell me I stink; I don’t know if they’re serious or if they’re joking. Non-smokers move away from me and I can observe their discomfort. Fuck, do they think they smell very good? Deliberately finding fault with the way I smell, fuck! Anyway not everyone who uses cologne smells nice, because smell is subjective (Shawn/male/Chinese/regular smoker).

Shawn sheds light on how the smell of smoke is likely to trigger smell and recoil reactions from non-smokers, thereby underwriting a re-organisation of bodies in the city. In this way, the extent to which smokers are welcomed in public space is a reflection of the prevailing stratification of odiferous bodies. Angel (female/Chinese/ex-smoker) testifies to how she feels socio-spatially estranged from others whenever she navigates through a crowded street

There’ll be this circumference of empty space around you, because people automatically move away from you. It’s a strategy to get myself out of the crowd quickly, but I can see how people avoid me like a plague.

Moreover, this retention of an interpersonal space between smokers and non-smokers may indicate not just an abhorrence towards the smell of cigarette smoke, but also a fear of cross-contamination, as malodour intersects with ‘dirt’, ‘impurity’ and a lack of (moral) hygiene

Smoking points are seen as dirty and messy, with all the ash and cigarette smoke. Non-smokers then grow to hate these spaces and the people making use of them (Indu/male/Indian/social smoker).

This quote states how disparaged smellscapes impinge on non-smokers’ senses of place, and are “spatially ordered or place related” (Porteous, 1985, p. 359). My non-smoking respondents profess that they would normally eschew designated as well as more informal smoking points in public spaces because they dislike being assaulted with cigarette smoke

Smokers are a nuisance. They smoke all over the bus stop, and stink it up. Or, the whole air-conditioned bus becomes infected with their smell when they board it (Jake/male/Chinese/non-smoker).

I don’t like smoke getting ‘soaked’ into my clothes. It’s not a very clean feeling. And I’ll feel breathless, like I’m choking (Joan/female/Chinese/non-smoker).

If cigarette smoke were odourless then I won’t feel so irritated. It’s not just the lung cancer threat—that’s intangible when the smoke hits my face. But the odour of the smoke is very tangible. I’ll try to get out of the way of the smoke as fast as I can (Joline/female/Chinese/non-smoker).

Jake and Joan’s quotes underscore the interrelations between the airborne, contagious nature of odour, its associated ‘griminess’ and the inducement of ‘choking’ and disgust that “seeps from the wounds of everyday raw encounter[s]” (Nayak, 2010, p. 2385). This resonates with Howes’ observation, that smell is

ideally suited to expressing the notion of contagion or action at a distance … they are always ‘out of place’, forever emerging from things, that is, crossing boundaries (Howes, 1991, p. 140).

Moreover, the cigarette-smoker is conceived as an infectious carrier and this infection is diffused through socio-spatial interactions

Each time a smoker lights up, he [sic] proclaims anew his [sic] support of the smoking of tobacco and his [sic] opposition to non-smoking and little weight attaches to any mere words he [sic] may utter in contradiction to the teaching of his actions. Each word of appreciation of smoking also tends to spread the disease. Every smoker is, in fact, actively infectious and makes himself [sic] into a gratuitous advertisement for tobacco (Johnston, 1957, p. 10).

Congruent with the notion of ‘infection’, Miller (1997, p. 8) observes that “disgust must be accompanied by … the danger inherent in pollution and contamination, the danger of defilement”. These adverse sensual assessments are exacerbated by the medicalisation of passive smoking, one that is deeply couched in a public health discourse propagated by Singapore’s Health Promotion Board (HPB). Such a discourse avers that a non-smoker exposed to secondhand smoke is no less susceptible to smoking-related health problems such as

Eye, nose and throat irritations…You may think that it is just a minor discomfort, but the harm goes a long way…we are exposed daily to a form of air pollution that causes twice as many deaths as all other types of air pollution put together, that is Environmental Tobacco Smoke (ETS).¹

The ascent of ‘involuntary smoking’ and, relatedly, notions of the smoker as a disseminator of carcinogenic substances and putrid smells have “radically defined the terms within which smoking can be discussed” by bringing the previously unnoticed passive smoker under biomedicine’s clinical gaze (Chapman et al., 1990, p. 418; Jackson, 1994; Berridge, 1999). Simultaneously, this increased medicalisation of everyday life allows for members of the non-smoking public to make more vigorous claims to smoke-free urban environments. In pointing to how the strategy of spatial segregation can fail sometimes, Jake’s (male/Chinese/non-smoker) comments teeter on the verge of self-righteousness

If you wanna smoke, your dai ji [colloquial for your own business], you don’t affect me. I wanna breathe in fresh air. I mean, I can move away, but how big is the bus stop?!

Jake implies that smokers are typically associated with moral laxity such as selfishness and irresponsibility. Since olfactory repugnance is often conflated with moral repugnance, this justifies the social surveillance and socio-sensory discrimination that smokers are often subjected to. Non-smokers are even enrolled as agents of the state

Educating the public on the harmful effects of passive smoking … will help them understand how the laws help to serve and protect them. They could then serve as a watchdog body for any infringement of laws (Tan et al., 2000, p. 1006).

It is therefore important to note that passive smokers are far from being passive victims of secondhand smoke. Although non-smokers may not always be able to distance themselves from the smoke(r), as Jake suggests, they can still choose to ask the smoker to move somewhere else, or get the relevant person-in-charge to do it for them

I used to shoo smokers at bus-stops or non-smoking tables away. My ex-boyfriend was shocked that I could be so confrontational. Another time, an uncle [colloquial for older man] was infuriated that I was so disrespectful towards elderly people. My parents were afraid I’d get beaten up by these smokers. That’s why now I just get the manager [of dining establishments] to chase smokers away for me. It benefits me and everyone else in that place (Maggie/female/Chinese/non-smoker).

In light of such socio-sensual tensions that can unfurl in public spaces, smokers tend to forfeit the desire to smoke where smoking points are not available, and/or walk longer distances in order to gain access to designated smoking areas. In addition, it is also not surprising that many smokers invest an inordinate amount of effort “to present an olfactory identity that will be in accord with social expectations, [and] in turn, gaining moral accreditation: he [sic] who smells good is good” (Largey and Watson, 1972, p. 1028). It is this point that the next section turns to.

6. Being a Considerate Smoker in (Quasi-)public Space

6.1 Scent-orship

While managing our sensory impressions on others, we are often engaged in social performances of vigilant deodorising/reodorising (Waskul et al., 2009; Waskul and Vannini, 2008). These mundane rituals of odour avoidance tend to be equally, if not more salient in the everyday urban lives of smokers. The ‘disagreeable’ odour of cigarette smoke clings onto bodies and some smokers are nervous that this might offend others, thereby nurturing a self-scrutiny firmly embedded in “affective economies, in which capacities for sensory discrimination … of shame and disgust [are] advanced” (Curtis, 2008, p. 7). Accordingly, many smokers adhere to sensory regimes and are cautious to minimise the smell of cigarette smoke sticking onto them. This is not just because they are likely to smell pungent, but also because the smell is a tell-tale sign that they have been smoking

I smoke spearmint, it makes me feel less trashy, because it feels like I am smoking Listerine [mouth wash], then I won’t smell that bad (Angel/Chinese/ex-smoker).

Trying to mask the smell of cigarette smoke can be quite problematic. I rub my hands in grass, wash my hands with toothpaste and I always carry perfume and mints with me. My mother will ask me why I smell of smoke. I would lie. Oh, I was at a barbeque or I was at a coffee-shop where people were smoking around me (Vinetta/female/Indian/regular smoker).

In addition, my smoking respondents demonstrate that olfactory avoidance strategies are profoundly spatial. Anxieties surrounding the public evaluation of smoking selves greatly influence smokers’ utilisation of urban spaces. Many remarked that it is about positioning the self in favourable places and dislocating the self from less-than-favourable ones

I don’t go to smoking rooms because it’s stuffy and it’s like burying my face in an ashtray. I’ll smell damn bad later (Flora/female/Chinese/regular smoker).

When I smoke I make sure that I stand in the direction where the wind will blow the smoke away from my long hair (Sonjia/female/Chinese/regular-smoker).

In an air-conditioned place, I feel more uptight because I know who the smell of [cigarette smoke] is accentuated in such enclosed spaces. I walk faster so that people smell me less (Hwee/male/Chinese/regular smoker).

The hegemonic sensory paradigm is reiterated when those who do not bother to ‘cleanse’ themselves after a smoke break are perceived as socially tactless: “If smokers get negatively judged it’s because they are stupid enough to go to air-conditioned places stinking of smoke” (Indu/male/Indian/social smoker). There are some who have found methods of olfactory management too much of a hassle

I wouldn’t want people to know that I smoke, but at the same time, having to cover up with sweets and deodorants, that’s simply too time consuming and socially awkward (Moses/Chinese/social smoker).

Concomitantly, as the way we smell is deeply enmeshed with our senses of personhood, there are some who would “intentionally wear the smell [of cigarette smoke] as a badge of pride and identity” (Jon/Chinese/social smoker).

However, it is not my intention to homogenise the differences in olfactory perceptions towards smokers. There are of course varying degrees of smelling disagreeable. Sally (female/Chinese/regular smoker) enumerates: “You know, the smell of cigarette smoke on us disappears quite quickly. But there are some uncles who always have an overpowering smell on them. I think they are hardcore, and have been smoking for a very long time already”. Jake (male/Chinese/non-smoker) concurs

If you smoke one cigarette, it doesn’t smell so bad. If you smoke lights [milder cigarettes], it’s OK too. If you smoke reds [stronger cigarettes] or rollies [self-rolled tobacco], that smells horrible. Especially when these people cough, it’s like they have not brushed their teeth for the longest time, seriously!

Jake alludes to how lighter and milder cigarettes are thus symbolic of one’s sense of refinement.

In general, smokers have the propensity to be more accepting of cigarette smoke. They are less likely to wrinkle up their noses at other smokers: “I don’t hate secondhand smoke. When I smell it when I am not smoking, it just entices me to smoke” (Vionna, female, Chinese, regular smoker). However, a number of my smoking respondents, not unlike my non-smoking ones, detest the smell of secondhand smoke as well. Von opines that the accumulated smell of smoke on anything smells “gross and mouldy” (male/lapsed/regular smoker). Likewise, Flora (female/Chinese/regular smoker) says

I won’t hang around smoking points and expose myself to the smoke when I’m not smoking myself. I’ll smoke away from non-smoking friends, young children, babies and pregnant women because I know it’s unhealthy for them.

Flora exemplifies that there are smokers who are also socio-spatially conscious enough not to put non-smokers through the ordeal of ‘passive smoking’. This act of olfactory civic-mindedness reveals that not all smokers are ‘obnoxious’. My respondents thus throw to the forefront the importance of adhering to a smoking etiquette that involves not just a mitigation of olfactory pollution, but also having an acute sense of spatial awareness, especially in places where their actions are likely to be assessed by the public.

6.2 Smoking Propriety and Impropriety

Smokers tend to abide by certain ‘unspoken’ sensual codes of conduct, especially in packed public spaces. When they absolutely have to smoke in such circumstances, Isabelle and Jarrell describe the adjustments they will make, fearful that they will be construed as selfish individuals

I try to tilt my lit cigarette downwards when I am holding on to it. When I need to inhale, I’ll tilt my head, exhale upwards, hoping it doesn’t bother the people around me and then put it out quickly (Isabelle/female/Chinese/regular smoker).

I’m not insensitive. I don’t smoke in front of people who overtly show that they don’t like the smell. It’s respecting their personal spaces (Jarrell/male/Chinese/regular smoker).

Because smokers have been negatively judged for endangering the lives of others and despoiling the environment, some have reacted to this by refashioning moral codes and reinventing their moral selves to realign themselves with a prevailing moral geography. They do this by calibrating the intercorporeal spacings between themselves and non-smoking others in public places

I use a portable ashtray and smoke at designated smoking areas. If smoking kills, I’d rather kill people who are already killing themselves. You never know when you’d just trigger an asthma attack (Eliz/female/Filipino/regular smoker).

The considerate smoker thus reinvents the self as a responsibilised subject (Poland, 2000; Thompson et al., 2007). However, smokers are adamant that they have not been morally reprehensible and the onus lies on the non-smoker to move away from the smoke(r)

I don’t care if people start clearing their throats or pinching their noses. If it’s an open area, and they choose to stand beside me while I am smoking, then that’s their problem (Seng/male/Chinese/regular smoker).

This is especially the case when the smoker is already located in his/her rightful place:

Sometimes I’m at a designated smoking point and a non-smoker will walk by, and pretend to cough. Hey! This is my proper space, not your proper space! I’ll be so irritated that I’ll intentionally blow smoke in their direction so that they walk away more quickly. At least I get them out of my sight (Eliz/female/Filipino/regular smoker).

Hence, it is crucial that non-smokers must also learn to be considerate to ‘considerate smokers’, by respecting sensory spaces and habits that are dissimilar from theirs. This is a potentially demanding task, considering that there is an implicit hierarchy that frames the deepening socio-spatial delineations between smokers and non-/anti-/smokers: “Non-smokers have all the support of the government behind their back. They think that they’re always right, and we’re wrong” (Vionna/female/Chinese/regular smoker). The fact that non-smokers have not always been thoughtful towards law-compliant smokers has been overlooked, with the exception of Poland who has collated some (encouraged) acts of consideration on the part of non-smokers. Some of them include: “being more accommodating, less intolerant and not occupying designated smoking areas” (Poland, 2000, p. 4).

7. Conclusion: Preserving Sensory Diversity in the City

By expounding on how sensual contagion in the form of secondhand smoke causes non-smokers to be embroiled in an antagonistic relation with smokers, I have demonstrated that olfactory values and perceptions are bound up in urban Singapore. In so doing, I have argued that one’s sensory habitus plays an integral role in the socio-spatial stratification of odiferous smoking bodies. By foregrounding the mutual imbrication of cigarette smell and smoke that mediates socio-spatial relations in urban Singapore, this paper hopes to contribute to urban geographical research by considering how medio-moral discourses operate in tandem with sensory ideologies in order to hold smokers in their ‘rightful’ places.

Even as Amin (2006) pushes for a recuperation of cities as spaces of cosmopolitan conviviality by restoring the rights of previously vilified (in this case, smoking) bodies to public urban spaces, I do not wish to romanticise a serene co-existence between smokers and non-smokers in the city. After all, woven into one’s sensory right to smoke is that of sensory responsibility—it is often mentioned that the smoker’s right (to the city) “ends where my nose begins” (Ezra, 1992/1993, p. 920). Moreover, envisioning such a peaceful co-existence would lapse back into traditional assumptions of space as stasis instead of a more vibrant urban politics. Besides, journeys through the turbulent seas of antagonistic social relations are exactly the processual ingredients that render urban space its urban characteristics

Conflict is not something that befalls an originally or potentially harmonious urban space. Urban space is the product of conflict (Deutsche, 1996, p. 278).

To think about the city is to hold and maintain its conflictual aspects: constraints and possibilities, peacefulness and violence (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 53).

Further, I argue, together with other sensory scholars, that if urban space were to be a confluence of heterogeneous groups of people, a “concrete and sensuous concatenation of material forces”, then an interest in encounters with urban diversity must come to its senses and involve a more comprehensive investigation of how these are refracted through various sensory modalities (Wylie, 2002, p. 251; Nichter, 2008). This is especially the case since “differences can never be quieted”, even with the homogenising attempts of the state at eliminating smoke(rs) (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 23). Similarly, Merrifield describes how these visceral, fleshy encounters with difference compose the city

In any politics of encounter, it’s not in space that people act: … bodies become … the spatial form as well as the spatial content. To that degree, the politics of encounter will always be an encounter somewhere, a spatial meeting place (Merrifield, 2011, p. 480).

Further, if urban diversity were to be valorised, then the question to ask should be: how can we foster a convivial culture, one that is empathetic towards a myriad of ‘unpalatable’ sensual practices (Zardini, 2005; Wise and Chapman, 2005; Wise and Velayutham, 2009; Wise, 2010)? Indeed, as Edensor eloquently explains

The advent of sensual surprises may be initially overwhelming, repulsive or arresting, but it also has the potential to provide a stimulating experience by this distinction from the familiar (Edensor, 2007, p. 226).

In any case, who is to say that sensual encounters with smokers are necessarily repulsive? Urban spaces of encounter are never predetermined but are rather constantly becoming

Here each moment contains the presence of the future … the moment is a political opportunity to be seized and invented … a politics of encounter explodes when moments collide … ensembles of bodies … act and react, affect and get affected (Merrifield, 2011, p. 480).

With each new moment, adverse sensual evaluations could have been reworked, somatic selves could have been re-accomplished in ways that would ameliorate the olfactory tensions between smokers and non-smokers. These tensions are also good points of entry for us to think through the dilemma of desensualisation because antiseptic urban environments are not vibrant and invigorating enough, yet excessively chaotic and unruly cities with sensory overloads are far from being liveable spaces (Guy, 2007). The way forward, I suggest, is thus to preserve sensory diversity while sustaining a dialogue between smokers and non-smokers.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Professor Shirlena Huang for her unwavering support and guidance.

Notes

Funding Statement

This research received funding from the National University of Singapore’s Graduate Student Research Support Scheme (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences).

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