As it turns out, surveillance cameras that have been “trained” to spot and read license plates aren’t all that good at discerning real ones from fakes. That makes it pretty easy to trick Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems with images of fake plates, making it possible to flood their databases with unusable information.

When hacker and fashion designer Kate Rose learned – through a conversation with Dave Maass, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation – that the plate readers kind of suck at their jobs, she got an idea. Her new line “Adversarial Fashion” is the result. Unveiled at the DefCon cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas last week, the garments spell out the words of the fourth amendment of the US constitution, which protects Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The cameras, however, read the garments as real license plates, and the proof is in their databases. ALPRs are always on, and can collect thousands of plates per minute, so for the system, there’s nothing unusual about capturing so many individual plates at a time. As Rose’s presentation at DefCon noted, overloading this kind of surveillance technology is one of the main methods of confounding it (along with blocking the collection of information.)

If you’re interested in making your own, Rose has provided all of the information you need to do it. But her line of Adversarial Fashion is pretty affordable, with prices starting at $24.99 – check it out here, or follow the brand new Instagram account @adversarialfashion.

If your city isn’t meeting your needs, just hack it. Urban hacktivism is a form of creative, citizen-led problem solving that often goes behind the backs of officials and institutions to get things done. Instead of leaving the task of shaping a given city to governments and developers, who tend to ignore the input of people they’re supposed to be serving, urban hacktivists take matters into their own hands by combining crowdsourced knowledge and skills with cheap, readily available materials. That might mean transforming a long-vacant lot into a neighborhood park, adding public seating to an area where it’s lacking, enhancing the safety of intersections for pedestrians or just making urban environments feel more responsive and fun.

At the heart of this kind of guerrilla urbanism is the ability to see the potential of public spaces to better meet people’s needs, make small changes and possibly convince local governments to make those changes permanent in the process. After all, the people who use those spaces every day know best. If you’re interested in carrying out some DIY urbanism in your own city, the internet is full of examples, guides and tutorials to get you started. These hacks may or may not be legal where you live – whether you choose to find a way around that is up to you, and most of these tools come with an obligatory disclaimer that they’re not suggesting, teaching or condoning any kind of illegal action.

Create DIY Crosswalks

Sometimes, cities just don’t seem to know where crosswalks belong. Maybe they’re not paying attention. Maybe there’s some kind of red tape involved. But a lack of proper crossings can be dangerous for pedestrians who simply aren’t going to take a stupidly long way around. If there’s a common crossing near you that isn’t marked, you can mark it yourself, whether by grabbing some paint and forming your own urban repair squad or setting up a temporary illuminated crosswalk, as laid out at Instructables. For guidance on paint selection and other aspects of this task, check out the Tactical Urbanist’s Guide To Getting it Done, a free resource you can download packed with tips for all sorts of projects.

Customize Street Signs

PHOTOS: These hacked electronic street signs make being stuck in traffic worth it http://t.co/XZkdOV8RdJ pic.twitter.com/pu9sFIx9eJ

— RYOT (@ThisIsRYOT) March 13, 2014

Some cities don’t have enough navigation signs to guide people to significant destinations. Some just aren’t adequately marked, like a misleading exit sign over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles, which one intrepid urban hacker fixed himself with a very convincing facsimile of official Caltrans signage (it stayed up for over eight years.) Street artists frequently “hack” signs just to make them more interesting and fun. And, just to say, electronic road signs are pretty easy to hack into just for the sake of making someone smile on their crappy commute, though of course you should never tamper with these signs, as instructions to do exactly that will warn you.

You can also produce your own street signs that look official at a glance, but actually spread positive messages in unexpected places. Seattle-based guerrilla artist April Soetarman sells her own rugged heavy-duty laminated aluminum signs that say things like “NOTICE: I never stopped loving you. I hope you’re well.” It’s easy to order your own custom street signs through any number of websites, all just a Google away, or you can do it through the Walk Your City Project, which links informational street signs “with web-based campaign management and data collection to complement traditional approaches to way finding.”

Hack Bus Shelter Advertisements

Brandalism, “a revolt against the corporate control of culture and space” by an international collective of artists, wants to help you intervene into ad spaces that usually celebrate consumption in favor of art, political messaging or whatever you’d rather look at instead. Carefully noting that the tools they offer “are handmade art objects and not intended for use,” the group maintains a site called PublicAdCampaign.com illustrating the types of tools required to get into bus shelter ads in various cities across the world. You can purchase these tools – er, art objects – directly from the website.

Build Your Own Bike Lanes

A lack of proper bike lanes is dangerous for everyone on the road, whether you’re a cyclist or a motorist. DIY bike lanes are almost always illegal, but that doesn’t stop people from making them anyway in a form of political vandalism that often forces officials to sit up and pay attention. The tactic can definitely pay off, as it’s not unusual for these temporary lanes – made of traffic cones, flower pots, or even toilet plungers – to eventually become permanent. Tactical Urbanism has a variety of tips in this area, along with case studies that show how it worked out in various cities.

Make Modular Structures Out of Found Objects

Hacking cities needn’t (and arguably shouldn’t) involve the purchase of expensive, heavy, potentially waste-producing materials. DIY urbanists are encouraged, instead, to “hack” into existing modular systems to make them work for new purposes. Examples include Mifactori’s “Circular Street Waste” workshop, in which discarded furniture and other trash collected from the city streets is transformed into versatile multi-use parts that could become tables, benches, shelters and more.

Similarly, the 3erlin Grid (say “Berlin Grid”) offers a grid-based decentralized open standard for building objects and structures that always leaves a distance of 3cm between holes for nuts and bolts so all parts always fit together and can be combined in infinite ways. So if one person builds, say, a DIY table for a city, someone else can come along and add to it. They’re often based on children’s toys, found objects that can be easily modified, like fencing and scaffolding. The principles follow those of OpenStructures, which include using recyclable materials, designing for disassembly and making components as cross-compatible as possible.

Many tactical urbanism projects are self-explanatory, and easy to recreate just by looking at what other people have accomplished. Check out some of our previous posts on urban hacking for a whole lot of inspiration.

Tactical Urbanism: 15 Low-Cost City Hacks for Fun & Functionality

The Rotten Apple Project: Quick & Dirty Urban Hacks

City Hacktivism: 12 Fun DIY Urban Interventions

Hack Your City: Guerrilla Grafter’s Guide for Making Ornamental Trees Edible

Street Re-View: Hacking Google with Theatrical Performances

Abandoned Bridge Amphitheater Reclaims Public Space

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.

Street artists turn entire cities into open-air galleries, but there are countless ways to carry out urban art interventions, and they’re at their most fun when they subvert existing structures. Virtually anything can be transformed into a surface or medium for art: billboards, phone booths, construction walls, street signs and even furniture discarded on the curb. Sometimes the motivation is political – calling attention to how much public space is dedicated to advertising, for example – but sometimes it’s just fun, like painting clown faces on busted couches.

Art in Ad Places Takes on Phone Booths

Pay phones themselves may have largely disappeared long ago, but the shelters that held them can often still be found on the sidewalks of large cities like New York. ‘Art in Ad Places,’ a campaign replacing outdoor advertising with artwork, partners with artists to install their work in these shelters. 55 new pieces went up in 2017. They say they believe outdoor advertising is visual pollution, psychologically damaging and pushed on viewers without their consent – but the places it’s found is ripe for subversion for other messages. “By replacing advertisements with artwork, Art in Ad Places provides a public service and an alternative vision of our public environment,” they explain.

Vermibus Remixes Ads with Acid

An artist known as Vermibus reduces the impact of advertisements by sweeping through cities and modifying ads with acid to rob them of context and turn them into strange painterly works of art. It’s a literal smear campaign, and it’s kind of genius. All he has to do is don a safety vest, remove the ads, take them home to transform them and then put them back up.

“By opening those spaces, I make them vulnerable and I create a conversation not only with the brands or the companies that put advertising in the public space but also with the citizen, breaking the unidirectional message,” the artist says in an interview with Open Walls Gallery. “Awareness is a very important and personal part of every artwork… the adverts might be legitimate if the viewer decides consciously to see them. But in order to have a conscious decision about that, we need to be aware of their dangers and for that we should be informed in the first place. [Advertising] is addictive, affects mentally and chemically our body, our decisions, our environment… it has a huge risk on all the levels that we are ignoring.”

Curbside Furniture Art by Lonesome Town

The unwanted furniture we kick out to the curb gets a chance to vent, however temporarily, in the hands of artist Lonesome Town. Traveling through Los Angeles, the artist paints sad clown faces on couches, chairs, computer monitors and other rejects. For a few brief days, each piece gets its time in the spotlight, becoming a work of art before it’s hauled off to the dump to die. Follow Lonesometown9 on Instagram for lots more.

Spontaneous Temporary Interventions by Brad Downey

American-born, Berlin-based artist Brad Downey is a master of Dada hacktivism, turning everyday objects and infrastructure in cities into whimsical, temporary works of art. A bike left chained beside a river might become a fountain, for example; he’ll put a public bench on skates, cut out a chunk of the pavement and stand it on end, tear down street signs and reassemble them into spiky sculptures. Sometimes his larger sculptural works are commissioned, but more often, he’s working intuitively, taking opportunities as he sees them. Each piece is a fun reinterpretation of its materials, sometimes rendering the objects useless and sometimes making them more effective.

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Art Everywhere 12 Projects Transform Public Spaces Into Guerrilla Galleries

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