Mapping urban ephemerals: contemporary practices of visualising the invisible and the transitory

Mapping the invisible and ephemeral elements of the city is a contemporary phenomenon. Designers select from arrays of open and crowd-sourced data to design hybrid maps communicating specific themes that weave amongst complex urban infrastructures. As urban design calls for a new understanding of cities as series of ‘spatial events’ this chapter introduces a range of interpretive mappings of quantitative and qualitative invisible and ephemeral urban data that address temporal concerns. It continues to explain my own smellscape mapping methodology for Pamplona and will be of interest to scholars of creative approaches to statistical and qualitative urban cartography.