If you want to see democracy in action, just follow the yellow, blue and orange road.

The path is paved with unsanctioned street art, guerrilla gardens and illegal maple syrup tree taps. At least that’s the lay of the land in Toronto’s Regal Heights neighbourhood at St. Clair Avenue West and Oakwood Avenue, where residents have a penchant for operating on the fringes of city bylaw-dom.

Dave Meslin is the man behind the curtain. These days, the citizen-in-chief spends most of his time tucked away in a corner at Stella’s Lunch Box café working on his second book on civic engagement in Toronto, due out in the spring.

“It’s all these concrete ways that we can transform a culture of disengagement into a culture of participation,” he said. “Two things I’ve learned is that you can make a difference, but it’s really hard. What I’m focusing on these days is making it easier.”

Meslin is an inveterate rabble rouser, well known for spurring grassroots political, electoral and community action in non-traditional ways. Sometimes all it takes is imagination, willing neighbours and a little DIY to get something done in a flawed system.

“People see working outside of government or with government as a binary option. You’ve got crazy anarchist radicals who break all the rules, and those who do everything by the book,” he said. “I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the space in-between.”

Meslin has carved out a space in his proverbial backyard where neighbours have since taken over — without his direction. That’s something that makes the civic scofflaw beam with pride. Birthing projects that fellow citizens take ownership of is pretty much his raison d’être.

“If you’re just turning yourself into a hero, you’re perpetuating the biggest problem in our society, which is putting heroes on pedestals,” Meslin said. “What we need to create is a culture of decentralized leadership where everyone feels like they can make a difference.”

Take the yellow, blue and orange road mural on Springmount Ave., which Meslin and the Regal Heights Residents Association painted three years ago without a permit. The depiction of Garrison Creek, which is buried beneath the road, was conceived as an activity for the community street party.

Since then, the mural had weathered. Last year, Meslin began to apply a fresh coat of paint but completed only half the job before life got busy. This summer, over a couple of weekends, neighbours young and old picked up brushes and safety pylons and finished painting it themselves. They didn’t ask for the city’s permission, nor did they wait on Meslin.

“For me, picking up a brush, grabbing some paint and reviving a mural that has brought happiness and joy to many in the community is something I could do — a way for me to show my daughters that you can take action and accomplish something,” Melissa Frew, who designed the original street illustration, said one recent weekend.

“It gives (the street) a personality,” said Frew’s 8-year-old daughter Elora. “I think it’s pretty,” added her sister Ophelia, 13, who said she had fun painting and thinks kids in other neighbourhoods would too.

Another neighbour, Susan Noakes, worked with a brush in hand. “Are we still breaking the rules?” she asked, with a laugh.

Technically, yes. The city hasn’t officially approved it.

However, the mural spawned a street-art pilot project that is now permanent policy citywide — with funding. One of the murals, of a tree, is two streets over on Lauder Avenue, outside the home where Meslin and his partner have lived for eight years.

“I’ve been pushing projects that leave a mark like a tattoo,” said Meslin.

Neighbours may not have known about the street art soirée, or any other community events or guerrilla goings-on, if is wasn’t for Meslin and neighbour John Keating.

They were fed up that the notice boards at TTC streetcar shelters along St. Clair Ave. were advertising events from several years ago. The residents’ associations and local Business Improvement Area couldn’t gain access because the glass cases protecting the poster boards were rusted shut.

“Most of the Allen screws were stripped, so you couldn’t open the thing if you tried,” Keating said. “We finally decided the most effective way to do it is to do it ourselves — which we tend to do a lot in this neighbourhood.”

So Keating and Meslin donned toolbelts and reflective vests, (“So I looked like I was supposed to be there,” Keating says) busted open the glass cases at four stops between Oakwood and Dufferin, and replaced the rusted screws for easier access. A woman even offered to help Keating hold up the glass while she waited for the next streetcar to arrive.

Now the residents groups and BIA can access and share the space.

“We can put stuff up there now and it didn’t require emailing and waiting for six months and all the other little things that usually go on when trying to get that done,” said Keating, who has lived in the neighbourhood for more than two decades.

“Obviously we don’t want to be breaking any serious rules or creating any health and safety issues, but there’s some things that, quite frankly, they’re just faster to do yourself.”

Keating did just that on his own property by building a four-sided information kiosk to centralize a location for neighbours to post events and notices. Local city councillor Cesar Palacio got wind and helped facilitate. The city made a cut-out for a concrete platform on the hillside and put up a retaining wall.

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Citizens should be reminded that public space belongs to all of us, Meslin said. “It’s really important for neighbourhoods to have these physical spaces. Corporations have their billboards where they get their message out. It really sends a disempowering message when all the visual messages we see in public space is just like, ‘Buy more stuff.’ You need to see messages saying what you can do as a citizen, not just what you can do as a consumer.”

Connecting Springmount and Lauder Avenues over a grassy slope is a concrete staircase with more of Meslin’s handiwork — an abacus he built out of wooden slabs and a concrete base for joggers to keep track of the number of flights they run.

Like many things in Regal Heights, neighbours are reluctant to share details about such unofficial actions lest the city find out. For instance, a community pancake breakfast served up syrup tapped from local maple trees. That’s against Toronto’s tree protection code.

The maples doubled as a temporary fix last fall to what neighbours considered a worrisome intersection. Using sidewalk chalk and fallen leaves, residents re-engineered the layout of where Springmount Avenue and Regal Road meet, narrowing the road.

For a few days, cars slowed down and pedestrians felt safer, neighbours said.

It gained media attention and city staff contacted residents to talk about what could be done to address their concerns. This summer, construction started on permanent changes at the intersection.

Sometimes bureaucracies and politicians, said Meslin, need a nudge to expand their imagination.

“It’s all about risk-aversion at City Hall — (they think) this might not work, so let’s not do it. The hardest part is to get people to imagine something different.

“We often assume that the world is static. Laws only change when people start imagining the law isn’t engraved in stone — nothing is.”

That goes even for the sidewalk along Rosemount Avenue, which runs east-west behind Oakwood Collegiate Institute, near the Regal Heights community garden.

The Toronto District School Board owned the land, which was mostly covered in weeds, so the residents took it upon themselves to plant community gardens that now stretch a couple blocks.

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The city agreed to pay for and install a sprinkler system if the community maintained the gardens. A year later, the city made repairs to the sidewalk and dug up the sprinkler system in the process.

It took residents months of emailing and calling back and forth to get it replaced, said Keating. When city roadworks once again had to dig it up, they just decided to fix it themselves out of their own pocket.

“I’ve found a lot of people complain that the city never does anything for me. ‘Why am I paying so much in taxes?’ ‘The politicians are just in it for themselves.’ — But I’ve found if you take some initiative as a community, even as an individual, and you’re willing to put in some work and some effort and take pride in your community, the city has been more than willing to meet us halfway and help out,” Keating said.

While the City of Toronto website recommends people who want to report a problem or make a complaint call 311, a 24/7 phone line where staff provide information on services and residents can flag anything from graffiti to road damage, the do-it-yourselfers can be frustrated by the sometimes slow pace in getting things done.

It’s not quite about fighting city hall, but figuring out how to make city hall a constructive place to work with, Meslin says.

“Sometimes that takes not an adversarial approach but learning how to be pushy in the right way, how to challenge the status quo or bend the rules, preferably with a smile.”