Shame the authorities by doing their job

Imagine a problem that you, as a regular citizen, can’t solve alone. Let’s say your city had decided to privatize road repair, and now your street, paved with poor materials, has lots of potholes. You could complain about it, you could create a petition to pressure local authorities and the paving company, or you could stand idly by waiting for someone else to take action.

Or . . . you could choose to fix it yourself! Of course, there’s a huge gap in quality between what you and your friends can do with a limited amount of time, money, and expertise, and what a professional fix would look like. But if you fill the potholes temporarily with cement, traffic would immediately move better and you could use the action to gather support and build pressure against the privatization of public services. It’s a great trick: temporarily solving a problem with a quick, little fix that can build support for bigger and better solutions. You could even put a sign on each patched-up pothole saying “citizens, not politicians, fixed this mess.” It might just embarrass the city administration into living up to its responsibility to provide public services.

It’s a great trick: temporarily solving a problem with a quick, little fix that can build support for bigger and better solutions.

The Black Panther Party made excellent use of this tactic in the 1960s. Sick of waiting for the City of Oakland to install a traffic light at a busy intersection near a school where several children had been killed and injured by vehicles, the Panthers set up an armed crossing guard to escort children across the intersection. No further deaths or injuries were reported until the traffic light was finally installed — more than a year ahead of schedule.

In another, more recent, example, the Rolling Jubilee campaign bought off hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of average Americans’ bad debts for pennies on the dollar, and then forgave that debt. While the project does indeed help a few people facing bankruptcy, it was never conceived as a silver bullet for people’s debt problems at large. Of equal or greater importance was the message it sent about the arbitrary and unfair nature of the entire banking system. It’s an ad hoc fix that underscores just how broken the entire banking system is, and how easy and beneficial it would be to simply erase that crippling debt.

Similarly, in a city such as São Paulo, Brazil, which has no recycling policies, citizens can’t create selective garbage collection by themselves, but they can bring visibility and respect to the informal workers that make their living — and take care of 90 percent of São Paulo’s recycling — through their own DIY solution (see: STORY: Pimp My . . . Carroça!). What society can do is celebrate them as heroes, improve their work conditions, and galvanize support for city-wide recycling and trash collection.

Or take the Max Feffer tunnel in São Paulo, whose walls were totally covered by grime and soot from engine exhaust. Alexandre Orion chose to selectively clean some parts of it through reverse graffiti — erasing some of the soot to expose the wall beneath, rather than drawing over it. No police officer could ever arrest him for cleaning a public space, so local authorities had no choice but to clean all the walls in the tunnel, which is what Orion wanted in the first place!

When citizens are able to fix something completely, but opt only for an ad hoc DIY solution, that’s bad. But an ad hoc solution can be used as a provocative first step towards bolder and more lasting solutions (see: PRINCIPLE: Escalate strategically). All it takes to devise a clever, unconventional solution that will attract attention to your cause, and pressure the authorities into action, is a little creativity and a willingness to get your hands dirty.

Originally published in Beautiful Rising.