Outside the Gare de Lyon train station in Paris, two red boxes topped with flowers look like overdesigned planters, or, from the side, mailboxes. They’re actually public urinals called Uritrottoirs, designed to catch pee in a system that turns it into compost for local parks.
“The function of the Uritrottoir is to solve the foul-smelling urban nuisances associated with nocturnal ‘wild pees’ in the city centers,” says Laurent Lebot from Faltazi, the industrial design firm that created the new urinal.
