To experience rapid urbanization can be disorienting. Cities and towns that grow too fast have to confront the challenges of collapsing and re-designing their transportation system while keeping moving. Pedestrians, drivers, cyclists, and any other person circulating through the streets of a booming town has to learn how to confront such rapid spatial transformation and become used to the experience of disorientation. In Austin, one of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. and a poster child of the creative and innovation economy, the effects of its rapid urbanization have increasingly become more and more visible not only in relation to the social and racial inequalities of gentrification, but also in relation to the visual landscape and its transportation system. As huge development projects have started to transform some of the most vital areas of the city, all the transportation infrastructure has been changing fast. From big holes for skyscrapers in the downtown area and Rainy St., to the foundations of a medical innovation district and a tunnel at Red River St., to the new post-modern town houses on the East Side, the city has been under intense construction, modifying its urban landscape and traffic patterns.
A curious consequence of the rapid growth of a town is the increasing variety of street signage that colonize public space. Signs of different kinds, especially with orange background, are placed, very close to each other, in many corners, streets, sidewalks, and parks creating a dense visual landscape. They are paradoxical assemblages of directions that sometimes are difficult to understand.
The memories of a familiar place, the usual routes, and everyday shortcuts, become unstable and eventually stop matching a rapid changing urban reality. They become out of sync and collapse with the imperative of the new directions. Detours to closed roads, must turns that lead toward prohibited roads, and construction works that never end, are part of the rapid urbanization.
Such visual density contributes to emphasize the disorientation effect. It is like a visual cacophony of imperative signals. Visual noise and glitch.
In the middle of the detours, closed streets, and the cacophony of directions, the yellow sign New Traffic Pattern has become one of my favorites. The other day I encountered one of those on Guadalupe St while crossing a street light as a pedestrian. Although the signage did not mandate any particular pattern and direction, it just warned people about the changes on the traffic. And the best of it, is that it was standing alone, just next to the blinking sign of stop/go in the traffic light.
Besides hundreds of street signs populating the city, huge cranes have also multiplied across Austin development districts creating a new sky line. These construction cranes emerge on the horizon forming visual configurations that announce the magnitude of the new structures that are being built.
The cranes are also markers of the wholes that have been made on the ground, the old buildings that have been demolished, and the ones that are about to be destroyed.
The enormous size of these machines with its long jibs and latticed booms, reminds me of the legacy of an industrial revolution. As the cranes appear surprisingly in some of the familiar streets and parts of town, they also contribute to create a feeling of strangeness. At night, when the red and white LED lights turn on at the edges of the jibs, they become lighthouses for the young creatives that keep moving to Austin in search of opportunities and new skylines.
