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

Beyond the ‘official city’ of Taipei, where modernization and beautification efforts are glossing over the city’s natural and historical origins, there is Instant City. Using Taipei’s conventional modern architecture as a platform and energy source, this network of illegal architecture attaches itself ‘like a parasite’ to create unsanctioned urban farms, night markets and other social gathering places.

The project is spearheaded by a loose collective of architects calling themselves ‘WEAK!’ after ‘weak architecture’, their term for the vibrant, organic and often transient structures that sprout up on top of the strong, industrial base city of Taipei. They believe that the two can and should co-exist, and that these illegal pop-ups preserve the “natural wisdom” of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese people who have moved from the countryside to the cities.

For example, there’s the Bug Dome – an “unofficial social club for illegal workers coming from the Chinese countryside to the city. This small pavilion was constructed mainly by some very sensitive guys from rural Guangxi, true masters of bamboo. The Bug Dome is insect architecture merely reorganizing natural materials into a nest or cocoon.”

Treasure Hill was an illegal hillside community built by and for the people who occupy some of the lowest rungs of Taiwan’s social ladder, before it was ‘beautified’ into an artists’ village. Atop the Ruin Academy – an abandoned 5-story building taken over by architecture, design, sociology and environmental professors and students for workshops on sustainable urbanism – WEAK! has created an illegal wood-beam ‘cocoon’ using no nails.

“If this volume of Local Knowledge that is now pouring into the Chinese cities would be recognized, the new Chinese urbanism would have a change to create something seriously new and environmentally sustainable,” says architect Marco Casagrande, who participated in the project.