This story was originally published by MinnPost.

One bike rider offers a light in the darkness, a beacon of safety in a struggling part of Minneapolis.

“I ride the Midtown Greenway pretty much every day. The lights have been out for well over a year, if not two,” Alex Tsatsoulis told me when I asked him about his little project in South Minneapolis.

As you probably know, the problem of copper theft has quietly raged in the Twin Cities for years, leaving parks and streets in the dark. While state legislation, good police work and undulating copper prices have calmed the problem in most residential areas, more marginal places — anywhere without Jane Jacobs’ famous “eyes on the street” — often remain mired in vandalized darkness.

That’s where Tsatsoulis, a 42-year-old father who commutes all year by bicycle through South Minneapolis, steps in.

“I leave for work fairly early,” Tsatsoulis said. “I take my kids to the bus, and I have to come back and get my kids. We do that all by bike, year round, and it’s very frustrating that this basic city service has just been nonexistent.”

He’s long been frustrated by the lack of light along the city’s best bike off-street route. He reached out to his City Council member, Aurin Chowdhury, who petitioned the city’s Department of Public Works, but eventually he was fed up with the lack of progress. As director of development at the Lake Street Council, a development nonprofit, Tsatsoulis knows better than almost anyone how to work through political channels.

(That said, he was firm in telling me that his lighting project had nothing to do with his South Minneapolis day job.)

At any rate, he’s not dogmatic about blaming the city for the lack of lighting.

“I know that there’s money moving to it and all this, and Public Works is doing what they can with what they have,” Tsatsoulis acknowledged. “But as a city, we just don’t try stuff.”

That’s where his DIY demonstration stepped. After months of fruitless lobbying, he went on Amazon, bought three “solar parking lot lights,” put them and a ladder in his cargo bike and hung them on the useless lamp poles. That was weeks ago and the lights have been shining every evening, for a few hours anyway, ever since.

There’s a lesson there.

“It seems like we should do something rather than simply doing nothing until the perfect solution arrives,” Tsatsoulis explained.

The idea here is that cities should be less perfectionist when it comes to solving everyday problems, of which lighting is a classic example. While I know Public Works departments have tried pretty much everything they can think of around securing copper wiring — dozens of bolt combinations, signage, brackets and more — why not think outside the box? That’s the kind of solution that Tsatsoulis’ effort is attempting to inspire.

“Through no fault of anyone in particular, the city has this attitude of ‘We have to fix this permanently,’” Tsatsoulis explained. “Obviously, with hundreds of lights out and miles of these lights to fix, it’s millions of dollars. But for me, it’s unsafe right now.”

It must be said that his solution of three solar-powered parking lot lights is mostly symbolic, though the light shed by them is real. Tsatsoulis only spent enough for three lights and isn’t planning any more.

But if one guy with a ladder can light up a quarter mile of the Midtown Greenway, maybe city staff, nonprofits or somebody can work systematically to think bigger about everyday concerns. Particularly in an era of scarcity, flexibility and experimentation are keys to progress in the city.

The lesson applies to other problems, too, things like traffic calming, protection for bike lanes, pop-up parks, improving vacant lots, temporary storefronts and other bits of low-hanging urban fruit. The three Greenway lights are a useful demonstration of how city planning might work differently to solve increasingly intractable problems around poverty, safety and quality of life for people.

Years ago, there was a burgeoning urban design movement built around this philosophy called “tactical urbanism,” aka the art of trying things out before you commit. The famous Times Square pedestrianization, implemented temporarily in 2009 (and then permanently a few years later) offers a classic example, and downtown St. Paul’s (now vanished) Urban Flower Field provided another. Years ago I attended a “Better Block” event on St. Paul’s East Side, where a crew of planners from Dallas gathered volunteers to quickly DIY remake a street, outlining a public plazas and wider sidewalks with flower planters, making benches out of pallets, and other small tweaks. A few days later there was no sign of their work, but for a brief moment it had improved the street.

To be sure, there are good reasons why cities, especially their safety inspectors and engineers, view these things as hostile acts. Liability and legal issues invariably arise, and engineers will tell you that DIY signage is a nonstarter. (Years ago, one ambitious advocate I know took some white and striped a crosswalk in St. Paul one night. He was chastised like a toddler a week later by his friends on the City Council, who had likewise been chewed out by city engineers.)

Signs and designs hold power and might surely cause problems in worst-case scenarios. But when cities are already facing systemic problems, like years of darkness, what harm is there to try something new and see if it works?

“I feel like I’ve done my piece,” Alex Tsatsoulis said when I asked him what’s next. “I’m out $75 at this point. Hopefully this gets attention.”

When urban funding is being systematically dismantled, flexible institutions might think more about temporary, experimental or bottom-up solutions. While the rural-urban divide grips U.S. politics like a zombie, cities are going to be starved for funding while facing growing demands. That’s when we need someone, somehow, to light the path in the railroad trench.

“To just have us as a city think a little more creatively about the solutions we have had, to really accept that it’s not OK for a basic city service to just disappear for years and years like this,” Tsatsoulis said. “We should just be creative, and agree that sometimes good enough is good enough. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

This post was originally published on Next City.