You don’t have to ask permission to make your city more abundant, growing food where once there was none. Sometimes this type of urban hacktivism is obvious to passersby and thus, susceptible to interruption – like planting guerrilla gardens in vacant lots – but sometimes it can fly under the radar, with a much higher shot at success. Guerrilla grafting is one potentially sly means of making cities more hospitable to their inhabitants without relying on official avenues. All it takes is some cuttings from fruit bearing varietals, a few simple tools and a little bit of caretaking.

Why do cities so often plant non-fruit-producing ornamental versions of cherry, pear, plum and other fruit trees? Mostly for the sake of convenience and thrift. They don’t want to have to clean up after trees that might drop a lot of fruit on public surfaces like sidewalks, nor are they thrilled about any extra work harvesting and distributing that fruit might require. Many city governments, like San Francisco, consider grafting a form of vandalism.

But planting and maintaining food-producing plants can be especially crucial in communities that are euphemistically referred to as ‘food deserts,’ i.e. low income neighborhoods where groceries are hard to come by (almost always thanks to systemic inequality.) Many people who live in these areas don’t own cars, don’t have a lot to spend on food and don’t have the time to make special trips out of their way to find healthy options. These spots – rather than wealthier neighborhoods – are prime for grafting.

Tara Hui founded the Guerrilla Grafters collective when her own efforts to alleviate food deserts in the Bay Area were denied by city officials. She figured she’d just do it herself instead, joining up with fellow agricultural activists to transform existing trees into fruit-bearing trees and collect data on the project to prove that it works. The group only splices edible varietals onto ornamentals in areas where volunteers have pledged to monitor and maintain the trees to avoid problems like pests.

Want to give it a shot? You’ll need budding fruit tree cuttings, a sharp knife, ziplock bags, grafting tape, rubber bands and a few other household items. Check out this manual from Guerrilla Grafters to get started. Click to enlarge, or download (in English, German or Spanish) at the Guerrilla Grafters website.

Drawing inspiration from a similar project in London, the bloggers known as ‘Mensajeros Urbanos’ (‘urban messengers’) have taken to the streets of Mexico City filling potholes with living plants. Each crack in the pavement gets a little bit of soil and a colorful arrangement of tulips and ferns, calling attention to areas of the street that need a little TLC while brightening up the city.

The bloggers documented the process in a video that’s earned nearly 40,000 likes on YouTube. Even if you don’t speak Spanish, it’s worth a watch, as the idea is pretty universal and their actions speak for themselves. Onlookers seem pretty thrilled with the results. It’s not often that a cop approaches someone in the midst of carrying out an urban intervention and praises their work.

Meanwhile, Steve Wheen, ‘The Pothole Gardener’ of London, has been enacting similar interventions since 2010, inspiring countless similar projects in the process – and his own gardens have grown more and more complex over the years. Of his own motivation, Wheen notes, “My neighborhood has a distinct lack of green space, and I’m a gardener with no garden.”

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

Skateboarding isn’t classified as a real sport in the Netherlands, but one duo decided to take the resulting lack of decent official skate parks into their own hands with a guerrilla solution. Now, legally or not, virtually any public space can become a skate park thanks to a series of modular DIY components by Martijn Hartwig and Dario Goldbach.

The JIRAJIRA project is the duo’s final work as graphic design graduates at Willem de Kooning Academy, and consists of nine hand-painted ramps, quarter pipes and benches that can be loaded onto rolling platforms and transported to any location within Rotterdam. Dutch artists Leon Karen and Vincent Blok were commissioned to decorate each element, turning the collective park into a sort of portable gallery.

Keeping the whole setup mobile is ideal, since the cops are likely to come along and tell you to get lost. The modular parts are designed to work in conjunction with objects typically found in parks and city squares, like trash cans and benches. Since skaters are going to make use of any surfaces they can find anyway, possibly including some of the city’s temptingly curvy war monuments, it’s a decent compromise with the authorities.

Rotterdam’s only skate park, a metallic monstrosity known as the Westblaak, closed down after being deemed unsafe. In a profile on the city’s scene, skateboarding magazine Kingpin says that since nearly the entire city was destroyed during World War II, most of the streets are smooth and there’s plenty of eminently skateable new construction. “The only downside would be that The Netherlands is pretty much flat, so not too many stairs and or rails,” they note, so clearly the JIRAJIRA project is filling an underserved niche.

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