Vandals Plug Open-Air Urinals in Paris With Concrete

She said that while men had “very broad” freedom to do as they pleased, women were “constantly being called to order” on their attitude or their clothing in public. She noted that just this week, the French tennis player Alizé Cornet was assessed a code violation at the U.S. Open for briefly removing her top, violating rules that do not exist for men.

Like other major cities, Paris has struggled for years with public urination. With varying success, city officials have experimented with ways to discourage people from relieving themselves on the street, ranging from mirrors placed to shame offenders to hydrophobic paint that bounces urine back onto their shoes.

The city has also made public urination a civil offense, and has a dedicated force of agents who seek out people who degrade public spaces by urinating or by other means, like throwing cigarette butts on the ground. In 2017, more than 5,300 fines of up to 68 euros, or nearly $80, were handed out for public urination, about double the figure from the previous year, according to city statistics.

City officials point out that Paris has roughly 450 unisex bathrooms, 150 of them open day and night, far outnumbering the urinals deployed this spring and summer.

Olivier Fraisseix, the head of sanitation and water management at the Paris City Hall, acknowledged that the street urinals were designed for men, but he insisted that they were only one of many experiments that the city was trying out to tackle public urination, “which is invariably one of the main issues mentioned by Parisians when you ask them about cleanliness.”

“There is a problem of quick, daily urinating in the street, and it is for the most part a masculine thing,” Mr. Fraisseix said, adding that if more men used the street urinals, the unisex bathrooms would be freed up for use by women. The street urinals, he said, were part of the answer, not a general solution.

“We are testing everything; we are experimenting everything, because we are looking for solutions, and if the experimentation only fixes one part of the problem, we will rework it,” he said.