As I walk through Arnswalder Platz, it often feels like a space I take for granted. The park is just there—part of the urban landscape I pass through on the way to errands. But one day, I noticed an odd, DIY garbage system: decorated bins labeled “Please empty me and put me back.” This caught my attention and made me reflect on how some people actively reshape their environments through what I now understand as DIY infrastructures.

These initiatives reflect three modes of engagement: doing with, doing against, and doing instead. Some projects, like community gardens or informal recycling systems, work collaboratively with city infrastructures doing with, filling gaps left by underfunded services. Others, like squatted housing or activist-led repairs to neglected spaces, resist or challenge official systems doing against, highlighting failures in urban planning. Finally, there are those that bypass the city entirely, like grassroots internet networks or informal sharing economies doing instead, offering alternatives that create new ways of living in the city.

For me, these initiatives reveal a dynamic urban environment shaped from the ground up. They make hidden issues visible and offer creative, hands-on solutions—but they also raise questions about sustainability, exclusion, and privatization. DIY infrastructures now change how I see the city: as a contested, participatory landscape where official and unofficial systems are constantly intertwined.