When the government fails to meet the needs of its citizens, the citizens will go around them and produce their own solutions, whether they’re legal or not. That might mean occupying an alleyway with temporary housing, using cheap materials to create new public seating and other street furniture, or turning a disused city square into a park. In the Omaha neighborhood of Aksarben this week, it meant cyclists rounding up 120 toilet plungers and transforming them into a DIY bike lane barricade on one of the city’s more dangerous streets.

Group glues 120 toilet plungers onto Omaha street to show what a protected bike lane could do https://t.co/5XHamPfqwC pic.twitter.com/sxr5d31HIU

— Omaha World-Herald (@OWHnews) May 17, 2017

The group, calling itself PSA, or Plungers for Safer Aksarben, wrapped the plungers’ handles with reflective tape and glued them to the street without asking permission from the city. They knew their installation wouldn’t stay up forever, but hoped it would remain in place for at least 36 hours to call attention to a growing problem, since this bike lane has been the site of multiple accidents. City workers came by to take them down after just three hours.

Todd Pfitzer, the deputy director for transportation for the city of Omaha, told KETV “You just can’t decide one day to go out and do something on a public street, which is owned by taxpayers, that could create a dangerous situation without at least working with Public Works and getting a permit for it.” But he also said the city wouldn’t have approved a permit anyway.

Well, actually, Todd, you can do that, if the city fails to take necessary action. Just ask your fellow Midwestern city of Wichita, Kansas. Members of a tactical urbanism group calling themselves the Yellowbrick Street Team installed their own makeshift bike lane safety barricade using plungers, reflective tape and masonry adhesive back in March with the same goal, and city officials ultimately agreed that a more permanent solution was needed. Since then, they put up real barriers in the plungers’ place.

Images via the Omaha World-Herald, Todd Ramsay and Jaime Green of The Wichita Eagle

The absurdity of single drivers taking up so much space on the road was vividly highlighted when a group of Latvian cyclists went for a ride wearing car-sized frames made of bamboo. In celebration of International No Car Day on September 22nd, the cyclists gave their bikes a temporary makeover that forces actual automobiles driving alongside them to treat them like they would another car.

They look ridiculous, and that’s the point. Standing out in the transparent structures, it’s clear how little space each person actually takes up within that space. The frames are easily three times the width and length of the individual cyclist.

The protest, held by members of Let’s Bike It, highlights how much congestion could be eased on the roads if more people commuted by bike instead of cars, not to mention all of the other benefits.

Vacant lots, billboards, rooftops and even dumpsters are hacked into inhabitable spaces in these examples of often-illegal guerrilla housing. All manner of urban surfaces can be subverted into safe, dry shelters, often taking examples in gray areas of local laws or flying under the radar simply because they blend so well into the city environment.

Billboard Housing

Belgian artist and hacktivist Karl Philips focuses on “themes such as gaps in legal, economic and social systems, the omnipresence of advertisement, unrestrained capitalism and consumerism, etc” so it’s no surprise that he decided to turn a billboard into an illegal parasite apartment. Invisible from the street, the apartment consists of a simple wooden platform and a clear plastic enclosure. Another more capitalism-friendly project in Mexico City attached a 170-square-foot house onto the back of a billboard as a residence for artists, who hand-painted the billboard for paper company Scribe.

Inflatable Parasite Housing

Attach a specially-crafted plastic shelter to an air vent on a building and you’ve got an instant inflatable shelter for the homeless. Michael Rakowitz creates these ‘paraSITE shelters‘, which narrowly fit the legal definitions of temporary structures due to their size, on a budget of less than five dollars each.

Dumpster Housing

Artist Gregory Kloehn turned an ordinary dumpster into a pop-up shelter with a working kitchen and toilet, storage and sleeping areas as well as a modular rooftop deck, outdoor shower, flower beds and even a bar. It took six months to modify the Brooklyn-based house, in which Kloehn actually lives part-time. Perhaps the ultimate in urban camouflage, the dumpster looks no different from any other trash container when it’s all closed up.

Shopping Cart House

It may not be spacious, but artist Kevin Cyr’s pop-up camper cart takes advantage of ubiquitous shopping carts to offer a dry, portable place to sleep. When not in use, the whole thing folds down into an inconspicuous wooden box that fits within the cart.

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Urban Subversion 13 Radical Examples Of Guerrilla Housing

Street signs and lamp posts turn into soccer goals, basketball hoops and mini golf courses with the addition of just a few pieces of plug-in sports equipment. The year-long installation by Florian Brillet and Nicolas Lelievre in collaboration with ad firm JCDecaux, which will be up until June 2015, turns the city of Paris into one big playing field.

This urban hack is entitled ‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano,’ a Latin aphorism that translates to ‘A Sound Mind in a Sound Body.’ The route that leads from one of these installations to the next has become a fitness trail, encouraging passersby to engage with their environment in a new, more active way.

Take a moment to let out a little bit of stress boxing, try your hand at hoops or kick a ball around. The creators call it “an appeal to the imagination,” saying “each post can be seen as a small chimera hybridizing existing forms to play in the same object sport, the image of the sport and the idea of traveling around the city” [translated from French.]

While this project was (presumably) officially sanctioned by the city of Paris, it’s another cool example of DIY urbanism, hacking the city environment to make it more efficient, useful and fun for the people who live there.

In the asphalt-covered space that would normally be occupied by a single vehicle could be a bike rack, a dance floor, an outdoor cafe, a kiddie pool or a beautifully landscaped public park. Sometimes guerrilla and sometimes officially city-sanctioned, these 15 projects occupy urban parking spots for uses that are undoubtedly a lot more fun.

Bike Parking = Superior Efficiency

Ten bicycles can easily fit within a single parking spot, and many cities have started to take advantage of this fact with specially-sized bike racks. Buenos Aires installed a few car-shaped racks in parking spots throughout the city, an idea that caught the attention of Washington DC’s transit authority, and San Francisco’s 40th street parklet (seen top) was created by adjacent business Manifesto & Subrosa. They’re also occasionally unsanctioned, with citizens taking it upon themselves to occupy a spot with bikes for a day.

Car-Shaped Tents for Urban Camping

Designer Michael Rakowitz created a car-shaped tent made just for parking spaces, making it possible to camp in urban locations while (kind of) blending in. A similar tent used a car-shaped frame and a standard car cover for an even more convincing effect, offering affordable housing virtually anywhere in the city.

Sao Paulo’s Permanent Parklets

The city of Sao Paulo, Brazil has some of the world’s prettiest and most colorful parklets, which are parking spots transformed into mini public parks. While many parklets are temporary, this one is permanent, with the spot fully paved and heavy-duty urban furniture in a bright shade of red.

Noriega Street Parklet, San Francisco

Diagonal wooden benches with built-in greenery take up three parking spots in San Francisco in this design by Matarozzi Pelsinger Design + Build. The seating was designed around the awkward shape of the available space, and the rule that it had to be at least three feet away from adjacent parking spots. Says the firm, “The acute corners are embraced as areas for planting and “chaise lounge” seating, where tight plan geometry becomes an excuse to put your feet up.”

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Occupy Parking Spots 15 Projects Reclaiming The Streets