If your city isn’t meeting your needs, just hack it. Urban hacktivism is a form of creative, citizen-led problem solving that often goes behind the backs of officials and institutions to get things done. Instead of leaving the task of shaping a given city to governments and developers, who tend to ignore the input of people they’re supposed to be serving, urban hacktivists take matters into their own hands by combining crowdsourced knowledge and skills with cheap, readily available materials. That might mean transforming a long-vacant lot into a neighborhood park, adding public seating to an area where it’s lacking, enhancing the safety of intersections for pedestrians or just making urban environments feel more responsive and fun.

At the heart of this kind of guerrilla urbanism is the ability to see the potential of public spaces to better meet people’s needs, make small changes and possibly convince local governments to make those changes permanent in the process. After all, the people who use those spaces every day know best. If you’re interested in carrying out some DIY urbanism in your own city, the internet is full of examples, guides and tutorials to get you started. These hacks may or may not be legal where you live – whether you choose to find a way around that is up to you, and most of these tools come with an obligatory disclaimer that they’re not suggesting, teaching or condoning any kind of illegal action.

Create DIY Crosswalks

Sometimes, cities just don’t seem to know where crosswalks belong. Maybe they’re not paying attention. Maybe there’s some kind of red tape involved. But a lack of proper crossings can be dangerous for pedestrians who simply aren’t going to take a stupidly long way around. If there’s a common crossing near you that isn’t marked, you can mark it yourself, whether by grabbing some paint and forming your own urban repair squad or setting up a temporary illuminated crosswalk, as laid out at Instructables. For guidance on paint selection and other aspects of this task, check out the Tactical Urbanist’s Guide To Getting it Done, a free resource you can download packed with tips for all sorts of projects.

Customize Street Signs

PHOTOS: These hacked electronic street signs make being stuck in traffic worth it http://t.co/XZkdOV8RdJ pic.twitter.com/pu9sFIx9eJ

— RYOT (@ThisIsRYOT) March 13, 2014

Some cities don’t have enough navigation signs to guide people to significant destinations. Some just aren’t adequately marked, like a misleading exit sign over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles, which one intrepid urban hacker fixed himself with a very convincing facsimile of official Caltrans signage (it stayed up for over eight years.) Street artists frequently “hack” signs just to make them more interesting and fun. And, just to say, electronic road signs are pretty easy to hack into just for the sake of making someone smile on their crappy commute, though of course you should never tamper with these signs, as instructions to do exactly that will warn you.

You can also produce your own street signs that look official at a glance, but actually spread positive messages in unexpected places. Seattle-based guerrilla artist April Soetarman sells her own rugged heavy-duty laminated aluminum signs that say things like “NOTICE: I never stopped loving you. I hope you’re well.” It’s easy to order your own custom street signs through any number of websites, all just a Google away, or you can do it through the Walk Your City Project, which links informational street signs “with web-based campaign management and data collection to complement traditional approaches to way finding.”

Hack Bus Shelter Advertisements

Brandalism, “a revolt against the corporate control of culture and space” by an international collective of artists, wants to help you intervene into ad spaces that usually celebrate consumption in favor of art, political messaging or whatever you’d rather look at instead. Carefully noting that the tools they offer “are handmade art objects and not intended for use,” the group maintains a site called PublicAdCampaign.com illustrating the types of tools required to get into bus shelter ads in various cities across the world. You can purchase these tools – er, art objects – directly from the website.

Build Your Own Bike Lanes

A lack of proper bike lanes is dangerous for everyone on the road, whether you’re a cyclist or a motorist. DIY bike lanes are almost always illegal, but that doesn’t stop people from making them anyway in a form of political vandalism that often forces officials to sit up and pay attention. The tactic can definitely pay off, as it’s not unusual for these temporary lanes – made of traffic cones, flower pots, or even toilet plungers – to eventually become permanent. Tactical Urbanism has a variety of tips in this area, along with case studies that show how it worked out in various cities.

Make Modular Structures Out of Found Objects

Hacking cities needn’t (and arguably shouldn’t) involve the purchase of expensive, heavy, potentially waste-producing materials. DIY urbanists are encouraged, instead, to “hack” into existing modular systems to make them work for new purposes. Examples include Mifactori’s “Circular Street Waste” workshop, in which discarded furniture and other trash collected from the city streets is transformed into versatile multi-use parts that could become tables, benches, shelters and more.

Similarly, the 3erlin Grid (say “Berlin Grid”) offers a grid-based decentralized open standard for building objects and structures that always leaves a distance of 3cm between holes for nuts and bolts so all parts always fit together and can be combined in infinite ways. So if one person builds, say, a DIY table for a city, someone else can come along and add to it. They’re often based on children’s toys, found objects that can be easily modified, like fencing and scaffolding. The principles follow those of OpenStructures, which include using recyclable materials, designing for disassembly and making components as cross-compatible as possible.

Many tactical urbanism projects are self-explanatory, and easy to recreate just by looking at what other people have accomplished. Check out some of our previous posts on urban hacking for a whole lot of inspiration.

Tactical Urbanism: 15 Low-Cost City Hacks for Fun & Functionality

The Rotten Apple Project: Quick & Dirty Urban Hacks

City Hacktivism: 12 Fun DIY Urban Interventions

Hack Your City: Guerrilla Grafter’s Guide for Making Ornamental Trees Edible

Street Re-View: Hacking Google with Theatrical Performances

Abandoned Bridge Amphitheater Reclaims Public Space

The ways in which citizens modify public spaces to suit their own needs, whether by creating ‘goat trails’ in places that lack proper sidewalks or actively ‘hacking’ infrastructure, tell urban planners how cities need to be adapted and influence their growth. Urban hacktivism is a direct means of shaping cities to our desires, often through temporary guerrilla actions that ultimately lead to more permanent solutions. These city hacks range from taking over disused public squares and installing seating for the elderly to infusing everyday scenes with humor and fun, making the urban landscape one big playground.

Shopping Cart Sports by Florian Riviére

Among the many city hacks by French artist and activist Florian Riviére, the project ‘Don’t Pay, Play’ encourages customers to linger in the parking lot of a shopping center rather than going inside. The parking spots are modified using nothing more than some white tape to transform them into courts for basketball, hockey, tennis and more, with shopping carts used as goal nets or structural supports.

Wanderest Chair for the Elderly Attaches to Lamp Poles

Any light pole can become the backrest for a seat with ‘Wanderest’ by designer Nichola Trudgen. Easy attaching to any circular or octagonal lamp posts, the leaning stool is strategically installed in retirement areas where there’s little to no public seating available.

‘Info Pillars’ Guerrilla Takeover

So-called ‘info pillars’ in Toronto tend to contain advertisements instead of anything that’s actually useful for people exploring the city on foot. They also block large sections of the sidewalk, disrupting the flow of pedestrians. Creative team cARTographyTO hacked 35 of the signs and filled them with art, sculptures, maps and chalkboards, which got the attention of the city and encouraged them to reconsider their use of the pillars.

Tram Track Skateboarding

The tram rails in the city of Bratislava, Slovakia just happen to be the perfect width for a standard-issue European pallet. Modified with parts that keep it in place, it becomes something like a skateboard, zooming across the city with little to no effort as a free personal vehicle. Slovakian artist Tomas Moravec says of his project, “A new transport vehicle brings change into the spatial perspective of a passenger in motion and generally changes the life of the city, through which the pallet can run, guided by a map of the city lines.”

Urban Terrasse: Adaptive Furniture by Damien Gires

Octagonal cardboard boxes pop right onto existing anti-parking posts on the sidewalks of France, turning them into mini tables for adjacent cafes. ‘Urban Terrasse’ by French designer Damien Gires makes the sidewalks more functional, and encourages patrons of cafes lacking outdoor seating to be more engaged with their city environments.

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Tactical Urbanism 15 Low Cost City Hacks For Fun Functionality

Optical illusions that seem to produce real 3D speed bumps on a flat street may enhance safety by encouraging drivers to slow down, but such colorful crosswalk paintings could soon become extinct in the United States. Now that the Federal Highway Administration started cracking down on anything that distracts from the contrast of bright white crosswalk lines, citing concerns that drivers will get confused, attempts to make intersections more interesting could come to a screeching halt. Bright patterns on asphalt may fade, but other crosswalk interventions will live on, like interactive dancing signals, fist-bump buttons and roll-out guerrilla-style crosswalks for busy areas.

Colorful Crosswalks by Carlos Cruz-Diez

Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez has been painting crosswalk interventions since the 1970s, creating potentially disorienting effects for the pedestrians who walk along them. Some of the street paintings seem to morph in color and shape, taking on movements of their own, as you cross. “The daily journey through urban spaces changes our personality and makes us into habitual beings who obey rules that nobody questions,” says Cruz-Diez. “The artist can create ephemeral expressions that, by generating completely new events, transform urban ‘linearity’ and at the same time inject an element of surprise into urban routine. These ephemeral works are a way of producing different readings of urban spaces and of deconsecrating the utilitarian objects of urban furniture.”

Faux Roadblocks Encourage Drivers to Stop

Drivers might actually slow down for pedestrians trying to cross the street if they think their car could get damaged by barreling forward – or at least, so hope two women in India who created this illusion. As you approach the intersection, it looks like there’s a roadblock, but it’s an anamorphic effect. As seen in the second photo, the technique has also been used in China.

Interactive Dancing Crosswalk Signal

Tiny car manufacturer Smart hopes pedestrians will be so mesmerized by their animated dancing crosswalks signal, they’ll forget to jaywalk. A nearby dancing booth translates the dance moves of passersby into the ‘don’t walk’ silhouette, adding an element of interactivity and making the performance entirely unpredictable. Smart says 81% more people stopped at the light instead of walking out into the street while it was installed.

Virtual Speed Bumps

The idea with faux speed bumps like these is to catch drivers’ attention just briefly enough to get them to slow down, but not so much that they cause a traffic disruption. Philadelphia hoped to boost safety in the streets with these triangular 3D markings, which cost a fraction of real speed bumps and require very little maintenance.

Virtual Wall Crosswalk

If the illusion of road bumps isn’t enough for you, maybe a virtual wall projected right in front of your car will get you to hit the brakes when approaching a pedestrian crossing. This concept by designer Hanyoung Lee uses plasma laser beams to project oversized pedestrians in front of vehicles, making it very clear that they need to wait a minute before continuing.

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Walk On The Wild Side 13 Crosswalk Illusions Interventions

Pedestrians approaching a crosswalk button that has been modified with a silicone fist knew exactly what to do in order to get across the street. Anthropomorphizing a common urban fixture, designer duo Alfredo and Alberto make a walk through Los Angeles a lot more fun with nothing more than some silicone, glue and a #walkbump sticker printed with the simple instructions “fist bump to cross.”

The designers captured video of pedestrians as they encountered the guerrilla installation. Nearly everybody seems game to play along, some snapping selfies. While the Spanish-born designers don’t explain exactly how they made it, all it likely took to create was taking a quick clay mold of the button for a seamless fit, and a separate one of a fist, casting them into one piece in an eye-catching yellow hue.

This ‘quick and dirty’ urban intervention calls to mind the Rotten Apple Project, a series of cheap projects that anyone can replicate in their own cities, from turning a bike rack into a folding seat to screwing coat hooks onto bus stop signs. This kind of active participation in how cities look and function – often without the permission of officials – can enliven public spaces, whether the installations are just for fun or create new uses for existing structures. Check out 12 more creative DIY urban interventions.