Public health and sanitation Finding solutions to the public urination problem |07 September 2019

I think people will generally agree that even if we have more public toilets installed in Victoria, men, in particular, will continue to urinate openly and unashamedly in street corners or elsewhere. This is a pertinent and challenging topic that our city planners in consultation with our Mayor of Victoria will need to address, while keeping an open mind to outsourcing innovative solutions.

Most developed or developing cities of the world tend to approach this issue with prohibitive or punitive solutions aimed at shaming the offenders. Some have declared public urination as illegal simply because it is totally disgusting. But let’s face it. You can name and shame or take the culprits to court, but people will still do it. Urination in public, especially by men, will continue in secret nooks and crannies and even in broad daylight on street corners or on major roads. What can we do about it?

In Seychelles, our own LWMA is already in discussion with the government to try and build more public toilets around Victoria. They should involve the Mayor’s office in their endeavours. The pursuit of educational programmes and awareness campaigns by government and NGOs aimed at changing people’s behaviour or mindset are also a welcome step in the right direction. But I think we should also seriously consider finding more innovative solutions and ideas for our small town, subject to the community-based cost-benefit analysis of any proposed project investment being both socially and environmentally feasible.

Policy makers and those responsible for overseeing our Victoria town planning should not only focus on building more toilets in the hope that the problem will go away. We need to learn from other countries’ experiences, however practical, impractical or sometimes downright funny their approaches may seem. Here’s a few examples:

In one neighbourhood of Hamburg, Germany, the residents were getting sick of the night time revelers of bars, clubs, and a football club urinating on walls. So, the local community group came up with a scientific solution: they coated walls around their neighbourhood with a special hydrophobic material that repels the liquid back onto the feet and ankles of the urinating person. Some laughed and called it payback. I think in reference to the Berlin Wall, some journalists jokingly named it the Hamburg “Peeback” Wall.

As for the UK, its contribution to finding a solution is often more restrained and so typically British. In the N.W. city of Chester, for instance, any public urinators caught on CCTV camera are given a choice: go to court, and risk paying a huge fine, or agree to participate in a ‘Heritage Awareness Course’. Oddly enough, this consists of paying £75 to watch yourself pee in public on CCTV and then undertake a historical walk through the city’s centre while an expert explains the damage that your urine can do to the various historical landmarks and cobbled streets that date back to the Roman Empire’s occupation. How terribly British!

In Paris, as far back as the 1830s, French officials have experimented with discouraging people from peeing in the streets by installing ‘pissoirs’ on major boulevards, but people have continued to relieve themselves on the streets and against magnificent sight-seeing historical architectural monuments.

Now in the 21st century, long after the first Paris public toilets, the city is trying out a new innovation called ‘Uritrottoirs’ (a combination of the French word for ‘pavement’ and ‘urinals’). These uritrotoirs are marked with a signpost and look like red trash cans with walls to hide the user’s private parts. But it is only designed for the menfolk and male chauvinism is so politically incorrect.

It is claimed that these contraptions have a bed of straw that mitigates the odour and they are supposed to collect nutrients from the waste for the composting of public gardens and parks. Hmmm….That may be hard to believe, but as one male Paris official posted in a tweet, the uritrottoir is “an invention of genius”.

By far one of my favourites among the various innovative ideas that have been launched comes from Brazil. As everyone knows, Rio de Janeiro’s annual carnival always gets bombarded with body paint, food and drinks and of course, lots of urine, because there are hardly any toilet facilities in the city centre.

One of the carnival’s organisers, AfroReggae, came up with a great idea back in 2013 whereby their floats at the 2013 carnival contained turbo-charging urinals, which converted pee into electricity, and so powered the float’s sound system. Here’s a simple layman’s illustration of the Brazilian model.