Conophobia: seeing orange – a visual essay on urban stress in Montreal

Source abstract

Montreal’s urban landscape has become saturated with orange construction cones, turning a routine safety object into a dominant visual presence affecting residents’ emotional experience. This visual essay introduces conophobia as a metaphor for the irritability, anxiety, and cognitive fatigue produced by repetitive high-contrast objects, ambiguous work zones, and prolonged visual disorder, drawing on photographs, field observations, and environmental psychology. Existing debates in environmental psychology largely focus on green space, density, noise, and pollution, while visual infrastructure and temporary construction elements remain underexplored. The essay examines how visual clutter and reduced legibility act as chronic urban stressors and argues that cone saturation reveals broader issues of infrastructural instability and highlights the importance of visual coherence in supporting urban mental health, with methodological transparency provided on image sourcing and testimony collection, and clear terminological framing to avoid trivializing clinical conditions. This visual essay, featuring 12 photographs taken by the author, illustrates the extent of the orange cone’s presence. This color is photogenic but also raises questions about a potential new city-name syndrome.