In the early 2000s, Banksy famously hung one of his own works at London’s famous Tate Britain museum, and now, 15 years later, a Toronto artist has pulled off a similar guerrilla trick, this time targeting an exhibition of Banksy’s own work in Canada.

Tharanga Ramanayake‘s piece involves a Banksy-worthy critique of the art world, objecting to admission fees charged to see street art, which is typically public and accessible by nature.

The meta-commentary comes through in layers, with art on walls lining a street within the canvas of the piece itself. Street art, the artist believes, should be free, which his piece Free-For-All highlights.

“Theft,” reads the plaque, “is bringing street art inside and then charging an admission fee.” Ramanayake’s art used a sketch of Trolley Hunters, a Banksy work that was stolen last month before the exhibit opened to the public.

The new art was hung alongside a print of Rage, The Flower Thrower, one of Banky’s most famous works. It was taken down after security was alerted, but no charges were pursued and the artwork was returned to its creator. The exhibitors also noted that the art on the walls wasn’t really street art, in their view, but prints of public pieces, which would be sold in part to fund further public installations.

Designed to act as barriers, bollards are a common sight in cities around the world — but what if they could engage rather than just separate?

This series of simple additions from Teratoma dubbed PLUG A SEAT aim to transform (or at least extend) the function of the bollard, converting rows of columns into arrays of seating and table space.

The lacquered aluminum surfaces add a bit of color along with functionality, and have a variety of potential applications — they could be affixed permanently, or added temporarily by individuals eating lunch downtown, or deployed during street festivals.

These extenders can also be sized to fit different dimensions of bollard for different metropolitan areas (though one might hope that a future iteration could be able to expand and contract on demand).

In the grander scheme, these kinds of simple guerrilla furniture designs highlight potential new uses for old extant infrastructure. And who knows: maybe bollards will start to lose their original function as self-driving cars take to the streets, but instead of being removed could find second lives serving other purposes.

A subversive urban agricultural group in San Francisco is turning ornamental trees into fruit-producing surprises for the local population but while technically breaking the law. A simple incision allows industrious grafters to add living branches to the mix; these scions heal in place then effectively become part of the existing tree.

A fresher form of guerilla gardening, traditionally carried out through seed bombs and other surreptitious planting techniques, this approach makes existing plants yield free produce.

Organized by Tara Hui, Margaretha Haughwout and Ian Pollock, Guerrilla Grafters leaves subtle hints in the form color-coded tape behind to mark their work, eschewing maps to avoid detection.

While the city has over 10,000 apple, plum, pear and other fruit trees (and 100,000 public trees in total), these are intentionally rendered sterile to avoid making a public mess or attracting animals. The existence of these sterile plant species makes guerrilla grafting interventions all the more difficult to spot, since they are simply added to extant greenery and take time to bear fruit.

The group’s novel form of civil disobedience begins to address issues of food scarcity and accessibility, raising edible fruits but perhaps also questions about secondary effects, like fallen fruit creating street clutter. At the same time, fruit is expensive, many who go hungry in the city need to have their situation addressed and this activity raises awareness.

Their website also provides tips on ideal species combinations and grafting strategies, including the instruction manual shown above. The Guerrilla Grafters “graft fruit bearing branches onto non-fruit bearing, ornamental fruit trees. Over time, delicious, nutritious fruit is made available to urban residents through these grafts. We aim to prove that a culture of care can be cultivated from the ground up. We aim to turn city streets into food forests, and unravel civilization one branch at a time.”

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.

In a quest to evoke a faster fix from city authorities, a lone street artist going by the name Wanksy is highlighting holes in the ground with (NSFW) spray paintings sharing one thing in common: the rough but instantly recognizable shape of a phallus.

Like Hanksy, Wanksy is a play on Banksy, a world-renowned art activist. Found all around Manchester, England, Wanksy’s penis-shaped pothole sketches are perhaps crude but they serve more than one point. First, they provoke public calls to officials to clean them up while also filling in the holes. Second, but equally important for the safety of the artist, the phallus represents an easy-to-draw figure that can be sketched quickly with less risk of getting hit bye a vehicle. Third, the rough markings serve as interim warnings to drivers who might not see a water-filled hole at night.

Though the paint washes away over time, making these temporary, this response from a local council member shows that the powers that be are not particularly amused: “Has this person, for just one second, considered how families with young children must feel when they are confronted with these obscene symbols as they walk to school? Not only is this vandalism, but it’s also counter-productive. Every penny that we have to spend cleaning off this graffiti is a penny less that we have to spend on actually repairing the potholes.”

The notion of highlighting or filling in potholes by activists takes many forms beyond this novel approach, including a Chicago tile artist who fills in holes with mosaics, a guerrilla gardener who plants pansies in these street voids and even a pothole robin hood who steals asphalt from the city to fill in gaps with his own work and time. In the grand scheme, one could argue that this newest contributor is somewhat juvenile, but if it solves a real-world urban infrastructure problem, it is hard not to smile at least a little at his attempt to lighten the mood while fixing city streets.