Space, Health, Cognition

Sandra Perez (1)

1 ESPACE - Études des Structures, des Processus d’Adaptation et des Changements de l’Espace

Health geographics is a relatively new area of that discipline. It concerns the way (geographic) space interacts with individuals, their bodies, to produce effects on their health. These effects are usually studied from a negative standpoint. Space can interact via distance (ruggedness, obstacle) for e x a m p l e by m a k i n g a c c e s s t o healthcare more difficult, or via neighborhood (contamination in the case of viruses, or proximity with highways, an airport or polluting industries). This discussion is essentially about the latter aspect, through the presentation of a work being currently carried out on the spatialization of odors of industrial origin. Indeed, for some years a number of approved associations monitoring air quality have been recording, in the form of a corpus, the complaints of residents who are asked to describe the olfactory pollution to which they are exposed (description of the smell, related physical effects such as headache, even nausea, presumed origin of the odor etc.). This information is of course of interest to health geographers not only for the description of the symptoms but also for a more precise assessment of the r e s i d e n t s ' e x p o s u r e t o c e r t a i n pollutants. But these data can also interest linguists for the lexical analysis of the terms used for describing the o d o r, a n t h ro p o l o g i s t s s t u d y i n g sensoriality, psychologists to better grasp what is at stake behind these complaints, and neurosciences to understand the way odor recognition works. Not forgetting chemists who, in addition to carrying out physico-chemical analyses in situ to objectively calculate the number of molecules in the air, develop methods to assess the effects of odors, in particular on the level of anxiety they can generate.

Mots clés: Spatialization; odors; exposition; pollutants

Domaines: Géographie

Sandra Perez. Space, Health, Cognition. Séminaire COGNITION & COOPÉRATION axe 1, Fabien Mathy, Jun 2016, Nice, France. ⟨halshs-01366258⟩