This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There's this idea in city planning called informal urbanism. Some people call it do it yourself

urbanism. Basically informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community

that isn't through city planning or some kind of official process. And if you think about it,

this probably happens a lot where you live. If you put up a homemade sign warning people not to

sit on a broken bench or without a parking meter isn't working, that's DIY urbanism.

If you put out a set of cones or a chair to reserve yourself your own personal parking spot on

a public street, you are a bad person. But that is also DIY urbanism. Gordon Douglas has written

a whole book about this idea. It's called the Help Yourself City. It looks at all the ways people

are taking matters into their own hands, both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones.

He's local to Oakland, so he came in here to 99PiHQ and we had a great conversation all about the

joy and chaos of DIY urbanism. And we started out by talking about one of the most perfect examples

of the good kind of DIY urbanism. A municipal failure that led to a DIY intervention and then

to real permanent change, the Hellgate Bridge in Queens, New York. Well, so the Hellgate Bridge is

this kind of enormous feat of engineering that was built to be one of these single strongest sort

of structures in the known world at the time that it was built. I read once if all human life ceased

to exist, it would still stand for some hundreds and hundreds of years with no maintenance whatsoever.

The Hellgate Bridge is also a big kind of clunky old piece of infrastructure. It's a railroad bridge.

It had started to leak and crack and have little maintenance issues. Not the sort that we're

going to cause any danger to anybody, but it was leaking all over the place down under its

viaducts where normal New Yorkers were going about their days in Queens walking under these

old archways. And in particular, a lot of folks in this part of Astoria noticed that there was

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