Artist Benedetto Bufalino has never shied away from the wild, surreal and unexpected; previously, he has transformed abandoned cars into pizza ovens, phone booths into aquariums, concrete trucks into massive mobile disco balls and defunct travel trailers into swimming pools, among many other interventions. These projects never fail to put a smile on our faces – but the same might not be said for the owners of the parked cars he recently took over in Logroño, Spain.

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A post shared by Benedetto Bufalino ? (@studiobenedetto)

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Parklet projects commonly reclaim street parking for recreational use, whether by laying down rugs and setting up lawn chairs and grills or moving in mini parks on wheels, complete with trees and benches. But rarely, if ever, do they plop down right on top of parked vehicles in order to use the space.

Located at Parking El Espolon, the installation is custom-fit to these three perfectly spaced vehicles, so of course, it’s not likely any angry unsuspecting car owners are going to come along to shake their fists. But the project is certainly a conversation starter, inviting people to climb up onto an “atypical terrace” to “discuss, debate and imagine a new world.”

“Benedetto Bufalino is, in his own way, an ‘arranger’. Like a DJ seizes music already heard to do something else – a “mix”, in this case – this young artist who has made his weapons in Lyon and in design, he also, “remix” the real. Does an Ibiza model car evoke summer, beach, the art of seaside idleness? Bufalino redevelops it so as to transform it into a jacuzzi. Let’s stay in the car registry, which inspired the artist a lot. Engine in operation of a car, which produces heat in abundance? It can serve as a barbecue, once topped with a cooking grill. A long limousine, of the kind we like for weddings in Las Vegas? It will be advantageously open, its roof cut and removed, and transformed into urban friendly space.”

via PopUpCity

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

These days, “user experience” tends to refer more to the digital realm than our physical environment, but it’s no less relevant to roads and sidewalks than to websites and software. When creating something that people will interact with, no matter what it is, the goals are often the same: it should be useful, usable, accessible, findable, desirable and valuable (add “credible” when it comes to information). It gives you what you need, when you need it, in precisely the right form.

But in the process of designing something one hopes will be beautiful, sometimes user experience falls by the wayside. So-called “desire paths” are one example of what can happen as a result. Formed when people forge a path across unpaved land, regardless of any nearby walkways that may already exist, these paths are an organic and often unconscious form of urban hacking, when users decide what works best for them in the environments they occupy every day.

Who would’ve guessed from r/DesirePath

People made a desire pentagram inside a big roundabout. from r/DesirePath

Desire paths are almost like a litmus test for built environments; when they appear, they’re signaling that somewhere along the way, someone likely failed to determine what the design was supposed to do, and for whom. At its root, urban planning is a tool of social control, attempting to impose order upon the wild and intuitive, with a goal of producing an efficient system that’s easy to manage. Of course, it’s essential to maintaining the complexity of modern cities, and the grids and patterns that form the basis of most cities have their purposes, like streamlining traffic and navigation.

That may be fine when you’re driving, but walking is a different story. Most of us want efficiency when we’re walking, too, and that means cutting out unnecessary corners and curves along the way. Enormous pedestrian roundabouts might fit neatly within traffic circles and look nice from above, but when you’re just trying to get from point A to point B, spending the extra minutes it takes to keep to the concrete circle rather than cutting through the grass feels like a waste.

Illicit trails reveal a lot about a given place, the people who populate it, what their needs are and whether those needs are being met. That’s especially true when it comes to accessibility. Over time, it can become abundantly clear that ramps should be built for people who can’t navigate staircases (as it should have been from the very beginning).

A common miserable desire path found during a typical Canadian winter.

Blocked off alley doesn’t stop people. from r/DesirePath

Once you start looking for them, you’ll spot desire paths everywhere; there’s even a fascinating and enthusiastic subreddit devoted to them. They can change according to the weather, appearing when sidewalks get icy; snow can sometimes reveal invisible common paths taken to cut across hard surfaces like asphalt.

View from my dormitory, huge one with a fork at the end from r/DesirePath

Desire paths don’t always result from a design failure. Sometimes they just reflect the fact that people want to walk, run or bike on a natural surface instead of following pavement. Sometimes they illustrate the need for cities to be more adaptive; a system of sidewalks that worked twenty years ago stops serving its users when new popular destinations pop up in different spots along the way. And sometimes, when walkways are attempting to protect sensitive natural habitats, user-determined paths can be legitimately harmful.

A local college is trying to thwart this desire path by planting a tree in the middle of it. from r/DesirePath

The Oval walkways at Ohio State University were paved based on the students’ desire paths from r/DesirePath

My University giving into the desire path from r/DesirePath

Those in charge of determining the location and layout of official pedestrian paths may try to fight user-created routes with obstacles, but it’s a fool’s errand, much like trying to hold back the ocean. The paths will simply multiply. Rebellious in spirit, desire paths are a physical manifestation of the untamed parts of us that defy control by external systems. Sometimes there’s nothing for urban planners to do but accept the wisdom of the people who actually use the paths, and make them official.

Top image by wetwebwork/Flickr CC by 2.0

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.

You’re hurrying along the sidewalk on the way to work, running late and not in the greatest mood, when you see a sign in the adjacent field that simply reads “PLEASE WAIT HERE, YOUR FUTURE SELF WILL MEET YOU SHORTLY.” How does that affect your day? Little moments like these can bring some much-needed levity to the world around us, especially in dark times.

Impeccably produced, often enticing you to push a button or take a card, these guerrilla installations look pretty legit until you stop to read what they say. They’re easy to miss, if you’re hustling too quickly and tuning out your surroundings – but if you take a moment to notice them, they might just make you smile.

Artist Michael Pederson (aka Miguel Marquez Outside) creates these little interventions and puts them up all over his home city. Sometimes they’re site-specific, referring to things that can be found in the local environment, like a hole in the curb or a sidewalk that ends abruptly.

The personal space cards would actually be pretty handy, and who wouldn’t be tempted by a time travel pay phone? Check out more of Pederson’s work at his tumblr and Instagram.