Hack Your City

Some days your city is slipping on their responsibilities and you gotta grab crew and do it yourself. An ‘Urban Repair Squad“ in São Paulo did just that by painting their own crosswalks on several dangerous intersections. Problem is São Paulo is home to 11 million people, it’s impossible to find a time when the streets are quiet enough to do some guerrilla urban design. So when would all of this mega city be preoccupied indoors? Futebol! Worldcup!

During the different Brazil games, these activists skipped the matches and instead made their city a better place.

Crosswalks are one of the cheapest ways to improve safety in the city. All you need to do is slap some paint down and cars can tell that this painted piece of property is parceled for pedestrians. The more visible and distinct the crosswalk, the more noticeable it will be for drivers, and the safer your grandma will feel crossing the street.

Other folks have taken DIY crosswalks even further. Banksy was the first I remember, using the zebra stripes to get revenge on someone.

While other groups have used crosswalks to raise awareness of their importance in the public realm.

More crosswalk art can be found at Web Urbanist and Oddee. I found out about this all from Good.

He was a young Jamaican American and he just wanted to throw a party. His uncle had given him the best sound system in the neighborhood, yet he had no venue to play at and he was broke. What Kool Herc chose to do could have been done anywhere, but because it happened in New York, he forever changed the world.

Kool Herc brought the party to the people and set up his sound in the streets.

“To accommodate larger crowds, Herc moved his parties further up Sedgwick Avenue into Cedar Park. He had seen construction workers hooking up power by tapping the light posts, and so he started doing the same. “I had a big Macintosh amp. That thing cost a lot of money and pumped a lot of juice. It was 300 watts per channel. As the juice started coming, man, the lights start dimming …  The results shocked the borough.” Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, pg 78,  by Jeff Chang.

“At dusk a van rolled up with Kool Herc and his crew. His boys dragged a couple of portable tables into the schoolyard through a hole in the fence, while Herc unscrewed a plate in the base of a light pole and hooked a heavy industrial extension cord into an outlet inside. Soon crates of records, large speaker cabinets, and Dj equipment were set up and Herc started getting busy. ” – Hip Hop America, pg 26, by George Nelson.

He hacked the city and fathered the global movement of hip-hop.

Kool Herc had that hacker mind state though, he was the first DJ to buy two of the same record and play the break over and over, turning a five second snippet into a five minutes of something brand new. He also custom built his sound to be louder than any of the other local djs in the Bronx. Yet the act of hacking into the city’s hidden innards and demanding that it serve him, a young black man from the Bronx ghetto in the 70′s, is why Kool DJ Herc is the godfather of Hack Your City.

(This post was originally written last year)

Is your city taking away bike lanes? Are they too slow installing them where you, the riders, know they need to be?  Paint them yourselves.

“Do-it-yourself bike lanes are illegal, perhaps dangerous, potentially damaging to the cause of legitimate bike advocates everywhere and really, really effective.” – Dan Koeppel

Like the best architecture, DIY bike lanes are an in your face statement. They demand to be dealt with, to be used, to be talked about on boring blogs. Like the best of art, they incite. DIY bike lanes are political vandalism, protest signs in the trench war between cars and people.

“This morning I rode the bootlegged Bedford Ave bike lane while listening to pirated music and wearing knock off Converse shoes.” @jenniferdaniel (via @noneck

The beat behind the Bedford Bike Lane Battle is that Bloomberg bowed to bellyaching believers and blew off the belabored bikers from Brooklyn driving them ballistic till they brandished buckets and brought the bike lanes back.  Apparently Bloomberg okayed the removal of some bike lanes that lead directly to the Williamsberg bridge. He gave this asinine order to secure some support from a certain powerful local Hasidic Jewish community. Local politics are impossible to generalize, yet the funnest headline had been that the group wanted the bike lanes removed due to beautiful girls on bikes tempting the faithful. The Williamsberg hipsters immediately painted back the bike lanes. The battle continues, yet the painting of your own bike lanes is what interests us the most. Stay tuned for a ‘how to’ post.

Another example, here is San Francisco during the morning rush hour.

via la.streetsblog.com

They get busy down in LA as well.

(This post was originally written last year.)

Reading about Akay’s Urban Swings a decade ago was the first time I saw the connection between graffiti and urban design. He took concrete drills and went wild on the city just like any kid with a can of spray paint. His act of installing swings was just like regular graffiti in that it had vandalism, aggression, destruction, and creation all in one. Yet when he was done with his ‘violence’ he left something that benefited the people in the city, he left it better than when he found it. I never went to Sweden to check them out, yet I’m sure they made people stop and have a little fun. It was also probably a blast for him. I bet even the city workers who took it down were a little hesitant, kind of like taking a child’s toys away for some inane adult reason.

“Everytime something is done on the street there is a level of interaction involved. Maybe its not the interaction we hoped for or expected, but every project is an invitation to respond. Even if the response is someone taking down what has been offered up.” – Akay

That’s the same experience with architecture, especially urban design. Once the artist or architect is finished with their design and it gets built, they give up control. It’s up to the people who run across it to give it meaning. Sometimes it is not the meaning that the designer had in mind. Sometimes it grows to be completely inappropriate for the space and people that have to deal with it. Waiting for market forces or political will to change the design to a more fitting use could take forever. That’s the whole reasoning for DIY urban design. A few folks who notice the inappropriateness can go and make small edits to mitigate or fix the problem. Just like how a graffiti wall will slowly be covered up by better and better art, revisionist urban design can edit spaces and places, slowly making them more enjoyable, livable, and useful.

You can read more about Akay’s 65 swings in Stockholm and his other projects on Wooster.

Here are folks swinging in San Francisco.

Also in London.

(06/03/2010) And a brand new one from Paris.