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

Sometimes, a reclaimed piece of junk is all it takes to make a bus stop, bike rack, subway station or virtually any other urban setting more comfortable and fun. The Rotten Apple project consists of incredibly fast and cheap urban interventions that anyone can replicate in their own cities, from a simple hinged wooden board that turns a bike rack into a folding seat to improvised tools that transform scaffolding into a musical instrument.

A piece of scrap wood and some chess pieces, fitted onto the top of a fire hydrant, becomes a public game board. An old, unused newspaper dispenser is a cold weather clothing bank with the addition of a sticker.

Commuters waiting on the bus have a place to hang their bags thanks to an old IKEA clothes hook added to a street sign. Other signs were modified into sidewalk tetherballs or double-height bike racks.

Magnetic boards on the subway platform aren’t just a fun way to pass the time, they can also brighten up someone’s day with a cheerful message. A window of an abandoned building, bricked up long ago, is a public bookshelf, and a sticker applied to an electric main notifies passersby that there’s an outlet hidden inside so they can charge their phones.

The people who run Rotten Apple have chosen to remain anonymous, leaving only this quote from Victor Pananek as a clue to their motivations: “Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical in the truest sense. It must dedicate itself to… maximum diversity with minimum inventory… or doing the most with the least.”

When the city sets up so-called ‘Info Pillars’ on the sidewalks – but then fills them with ads instead of actual information – how should the community respond? In Toronto, hacktivists decided to simply take things into their own hands, and replace the ads with art and information that’s actually useful.

Last fall, the Spacing Toronto blog asked, “Is this really an ‘info’ pillar?”, displaying photographs of the installations. The narrow space on the column itself has info like maps and bus schedules, but the overwhelming majority of the pillar is covered in ads.

Armed with special Torx screwdrivers, guerilla group cARTography TO nonchalantly broke into the Info pillars in broad daylight and replaced 35 ads with poetry and street art. One was cordoned off with a velvet rope and attendant security guard, the sign reading “Sidewalk 54 – Private pavement for diamond members only. Dress code strictly enforced.”

“We got together and started planning an artistic assault against them,” an unidentified cARTography TO activist told The National Post. “One, to beautify the city and beautify the pillars because we thought they were awful and ugly, but also to raise a lot of awareness on the issue…. They disrupt the flow of traffic for pedestrians. They block the line of sight for cyclists and for drivers.”

Toronto artist Sean Martindale donated six pieces of art to cARTography for the guerilla installation, including a modified bicycle. The pillars were previously hacked in January. Activists covered them in chalkboards and invited passersby to ‘Tell it like it is.’

Have you ever asked for directions in an unfamiliar city, only to find that you’ve been pronouncing the street name all wrong? It’s not hard to do even in a place that speaks your own language, let alone in a city with a foreign tongue. Just try to say ‘Rådhusstræde’ correctly, if you’re not Danish. A new installation in Copenhagen will show you exactly how to do that with an interactive speaker and light display.

For ‘What the Phonics’, Momo Miyazai and Andrew Spitz at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design installed a speaker on a cable, along with a strip of lights, above street signs in touristy areas of the city.

Says Spitz, “We recorded a Danish person speaking the street names then split up each syllable. In true karaoke style, we placed lights above the matching syllable so that in real-time, you can see which part of the word is being spoken. When participants lift the speaker off the wall, it starts playing.”

Imagine if this kind of technology were available everywhere in the world. Even in New York City there are names like ‘Koscuiszko’. Mexico City has ‘Cuauhtemoc’. In Wales, ‘Pontrhydfendigaid’ is just the name of a village, and street names can get even more complicated from there. Pronunciation guides would eliminate a lot of confusion and some seriously embarrassing moments.