Orange Traffic Cones Edit the City

Orange traffic cones edit the city. They delimit the flow of movement, in cars, on bikes, and on foot. Orange atoms of infrastructure coalesce into transient patterns that guide us towards where we should go, as they caution us away from where we should not. Sometimes there are many orange cones, arranged in compositions and configurations across roads. Sometimes they’re alone, like a sentinel protecting us from danger. Orange traffic cones make their edits upon the city, establishing and reestablishing the mutable and fragmentary boundaries of the built environment.

For these reasons and others, it’s a rather monumental little object. It’s fascinating that an object designed to summon our attention is such an inconspicuous thing. Its ubiquity renders it invisible. But if you go outside and look in any direction, you will probably see these little orange cones. There they are… always already everywhere.

Orange traffic cones form borders and queues. They govern our behavior. They instruct us when to stop, and when to step, when to wait and when to go. Traffic cones can block a lane. Shift a lane. Add a lane. Delimit property. Establish boundaries. They can organize traffic as it moves, and render configurations of parked vehicles mute when they are at not in use.

Orange traffic cones are mutable, unlike milestones, that measure in straight, consistent lines against a fixed ground. From satellites, the aggregation of orange traffic cones must appear like magnificent constellations of orange stars, multitudes, stretched against the earth, reflecting their double in heaven. Always moving. Always changing. Always temporary, as we all are. Temporary like the stars.

Orange traffic cones demarcate construction sites by signifying pending changes; local improvement to public infrastructure or personal property, which itself is a signifier of progress… evidence of a civilization moving forward, against entropy, as measured in miles, by its roads, paths, and places that one can go.

Orange traffic cones demarcate the conditions of possibility by defining and enforcing the conditions of the road. They allow for real-time modifications of the map against the territory. Therefore, their meaning must be multivalent and variable. They must be open signifiers, made legible by the shape of the context in which they operate. These open signifiers are often augmented by signs that elaborate on their meaning with texts and symbols, but these signs, unlike orange traffic cones, are strictly constrained in what they can say. Traffic cones afford much more variation, like a language with one character. That single character can produce boundless adaptations of meanings.

Orange traffic cones share the road with other open signifiers — other one-word languages — which are open to their own variations and elaborations. And yet, they operate unequivocally. Orange traffic cones adapt themselves to the needs at hand. Like the honk of car horns, which remind us that with one note one can express a full range of emotional valances.

Orange traffic cones are cousins to orange traffic barrels, with their blinky-blinky lights that are themselves the decedents of ancient lighthouses, which kept the shores free of shipwrecks. When composed and configured on the road at night, they recall the asynchronous dance of fireflies, evidencing that sometimes beauty is an accident of safety.

Orange traffic cones offer affordances for detours and détournements. They are totems of the social relations manifested in the order of things. Their authority lies in their appeal to safety, their appeal to order. This authority confers these humble, yet potent, objects with significance, in part, because their appeal to safety is the non plus ultra of the design of the city and the society it serves.

Orange traffic cones delimit the explicit patterns and unconscious rhythms of a city. They edit the city. They orchestrate our behavior. They keep us safe. Orange traffic cones are everywhere, followed by more orange traffic cones, which are followed by orange traffic cones that are followed by orange traffic cones that are followed by orange traffic cones that are followed by orange traffic cones…