Vespasienne in Paris, France.
Known as the light city, Paris sports the title of capital of love and European charm. But behind the romantic image of the enlightened Eiffel Tower, a problem is hidden that has bothers residents, tourists and authorities for several years: the pee on the street.
Urbaning in public spaces is a common infraction in large urban centers, but in Paris behavior has even gained a proper name: wild peewhich in a free translation means “wild pee”.
In the French capital, it is not uncommon to circulate through the meter stations and feel a strong odor to urine in the corridors or on the platforms, or walk the streets at night and surprise someone to relieve themselves in a corner.
More than 200 years of wild pee
The city has combated this inconvenient habit of its inhabitants for many years. In the nineteenth century, local police installed a series of iron bars or cone -shaped structures on corners and nooks from the streets of Paris, in an attempt to create obstacles for those relieved in buildings, walks or streets.
Some of these structures can still be seen today in the city. Became known as Piping.
Around 1840, Claude-Philibert Barthelot, Count of Rambuteau and then Mayor of Paris, created the first modern urinols, in the context of a campaign to make the city cleaner. The urinals of the time were integrated into simple cylindrical structures, also used for warnings and ads. By the format, the Parisians dubbed us from Rambuteau columns (Rambuteau columns).
Over time, the city sought to dissociate the image of the old mayor of public urinals and a new name emerged: Vespasian. The word refers to the Roman Emperor Vespasian, to whom the creation of a urine tax in ancient Rome is attributed.
But Urinols quickly became places of sexual activityespecially among men, due to the privacy they provide.
In the 1960s, the French National Assembly approved a project to remove all Vespasian from the streets, in order to prevent sexual encounters. Only in 1981 Paris installed his first unisex public toilet. Today, public booths are spread throughout the city.
Paris leads, by the way, a ranking prepared by the Le Monde newspaper about European cities with more public bathrooms per square kilometer: there are more than 6 per km², far above the second classified, Lyon, which is 3 per km². Still, the problem persists, according to municipal residents and employees who deal with the issue daily.
“The staff are not very ashamed. Don’t even worry about hiding behind a shrub or a tree”, Says Brazilian Isabel Vigneron, who has been living in Paris for a year and a half and claims to often see men urinating in public.
“And this is even happening several public toilets on the street. I’ve seen people urinating on the cabin walls. Not inside, but outside.”
Autarchy responds with art and repellent paint, but…
In recent decades, the City Council has resorted to several strategies against Pipi Sauvage, such as the application of repellent urine paints on the tours and walls, the installation of Ecological Urinóis and even Artistic Interventions.
One of these initiatives involved the placement of murals in hidden zones of train stations – places where the practice was common – from 2021. The goal was reduce the sensation of privacy that encouraged the offenders.
“We set up a sensor to realize if the incentive was operating. And on average we reduced the jets by 80%,” Isabelle Collin, a behavioral science expert and a consultant at the Public Company SNCF who participated in the project, in an interview recorded in 2023.
In another creative attempt, Paris tested ecological urinols that promised to turn urine into flower fertilizer. The red structures were stuffed with straw and conceived not to free odor. The measure gained international attention in 2017, when it was launched, but quickly generated controversy.
Some people argued that open -air urinols, installed next to monuments and in front of the Sena River, where cruises and other vessels pass, damaged the city’s historical image and were offensive. Some of these urinols were even vandalized by radical feminist activists, who accused the device to be sexist and to exclude women.
The House also even bet on the creation of a special brigade Against incivialities, activates since 2016. In addition to watching who urine on the streets, agents sanction other censurable behaviors, such as throwing trash to the ground or not collecting the waste of dogs.
Urinating in public constitutes an infraction provided for in the French Penal Code and, in Paris, can be worth a Fine up to 150 euros.
not poetry wild pee
For many residents, all of these measures have done little to dissuade those who urine on the streets of Paris. Parisian Edwart Vignot began to record in photographs the shapes he saw in the spots left by urine on walls and tours.
“It is possible to see poetry in them, because they create a form, an image. At first glance, it seems abstract, but if we look carefully, we see animals, figures … the universe,” he told the BBC.
The director shares his photographs on social networks as a form of amateur art. “That’s why I like to be a hiker in Paris and simply observe.”
But after all, why do Parisians have kept the “tradition” of Pipi Sauvage for so many years?
“Way to mark territory”
Behavioral psychologist Nicolas Fieulaine was one of the consultants who helped the Paris Chamber delineate the strategy of installing artistic murals in the railway stations. In an interview with BBC News in 2023, he tried to explain the phenomenon.
“In the French imagination – and I’m not sure if this happens in other countries – urinating in public is an option that seems to be always available, and this does not call into question the moral character of the person,” he says, also criticizing solutions based only on urinols intended for male public.
“People urinate there, then in another place, then in another… and this conveys a sense of freedom, of power over public spaces, which excludes women”He says.“ It’s a powerful form of appropriation. Urge It is a way to mark territory.”
For the expert, hygiene became a taboo in France in the nineteenth century, when a public health movement emerged in the country. Hygiene, as it was called, defended social and behavioral standards in the name of health.
This movement helped revolutionize several European cities, including Paris, by proposing the construction of sewage networks, drinking water supply, creating parks and public spaces, as well as encouraging personal hygiene practices such as regular bath and banning trash dumping on the streets. But, according to Fieulaine, this philosophy also created a feeling of shame about all that was considered dirty or attached to body fluids.
“This is how this became a small taboo,” he says. “We do not face these things ahead. When exposed to other types of toilets, such as those in which we need to squat, the French feel repulsed because it forces them to look back and to confront issues they themselves have created.”
