In the streets of Hamburg, Germany, a new form of urban deterrent is turning public urination into an instant lesson in cause and effect. Known as “anti-pee paint,” this specialized nano-coating creates a superhydrophobic surface, repelling liquids so completely that anything touching it slides off with remarkable force. The result? Anyone attempting to relieve themselves on a treated wall experiences an immediate and unforgettable splash-back. The technology borrows from nature, mimicking the microscopic structure of a lotus leaf. Tiny ridges and air pockets prevent any liquid from adhering, meaning walls remain clean while offenders get an eye-opening consequence — all without the need for confrontation, fines, or patrols. It’s an ingenious blend of physics and human psychology: the paint doesn’t punish with authority, it punishes with instant feedback. First popularized in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district in 2015, this approach has since been trialed in other cities like London and San Francisco. While the coating is costly, city authorities note significant savings on cleaning and maintenance, and a marked decrease in repeat offenses. Beyond hygiene, it’s a striking example of how urban design and material science can work together to shape behavior. For engineers, urban planners, and city residents, anti-pee paint is both a marvel of nano-engineering and a lesson in poetic justice. The streets stay cleaner, the message is immediate, and the offender leaves with a story they won’t soon forget.
This is another lie.
Beware of cartoon drawings promising big things. Because if they can’t show you the thing, it doesn’t exist.
Piss on an angle, got it.
If you’re not aiming for the corner where the wall meets the ground, what are you even doing in life?
Anything to not build public washrooms
The problem is that public toilets need to be indestructible. The one near my home is constantly out of order because some asshole vandalized it. Restaurants, shops and delis only let customers use their restroom - probably for the same reason.
In Montréal all our major parks have washroom facilities and if they for some reason don’t there’s still gunna be a port-o-potty nearby. There should definitely be two near the beach but the point still stands that you can definitely have nice things, or at least something stopping the majority of public urination. And hell, I’m sure that we have issues with them here, too, but it’s a small price to pay to have a civilized city so whatever.
Longer term the city just needs to adopt any of the myriad studied ways homeless and poverty has been reduced in other places which will also reduce the danger to these things getting broken.
Back in my home country they had these washrooms that were basically giant urinals covered by these side walls so they would get hosed down but they were not for women.
I have seen places in Europe that pull out these portable urinal things and put them all over the entertainment district on Friday nights to prevent drunk dudes pissing all over and it seems to work well
Hit it on a 45 degree angle along the horizontal plane and it will bounce onto the shoes of the fella next to you
You just invented a turn-based game to play with friends.
It’s not that Hamburg doesn’t have public toilets, but Hamburg is known for the “Reeperbahn” - a street lined with bars (I think the American equivalent to it would be something like Bourbon Street in New Orleans?). People go there to get wasted off their asses and no matter how many public restrooms you put up there, they will piss wherever.
(There’s also an amazing documentary series about the Supermarket on that street and the characters that visit it)
Ah, The good old pennymarkt documentary. One of the most legendary German documentaries ever created.
Pee sideways at an angle? Pee on the floor?
How much does that useless paint cost?? I guess it’s cheaper than installing toilets, but I bet it won’t deter a single person from peeing.
How much does that useless paint cost??
as much as some subcontractors to get rich
Cities: “ugh, toilets are so expensive to maintain. Remove them.”
Cities: “everything smells like piss now :(”
If there is no toilets available, a wall or a bush does the trick just fine. I ain’t going to rupture my fucking bladder because some bean counter decided to count beans.
I’ll piss right on the ground, fuck it. Der Strom lässt sich nicht aufhalten!
Just pee directly on to the floor then.
Mooie chemicals to leak onto the environment. This is really a pfas 2.0 waiting to happen
Guarantee it’s a PFAS type chemical.
Yup, it’s fucking dumb and Its easily countered by peeing on the wall at an angle as well.
Or better yet, directly onto the ground beside the wall…
That’s what we call my uncle’s wife who likes light green walls. We spell it different though.
New? Anti pee architecture has always been a thing, nanotech might be new but if you see diagonal wall attachments that’s what they are for
This is hostile architecture. Build toilets instead.
They have toilets. People are just wretched.
I’ve been to a very large capital in Europe recently, there’s been a whole three toilets when I needed one, ranging from 15 to 30 minutes away, and the best part is when I got to them, all were inaccessible because they are located inside of the park that closes doors at 18:00 (before that, in fact). The toilets are even marked 24h on the map, very convenient.
So yeah, even not considering drunk people, there are not nearly enough toilets in a lot of places.
A lot of Europe charges to use them though, whoch i find weird. Imo they should be funded by public budgets the way libraries, school buses, roads etc are.
Like, of ya gotta pee, ya gotta pee. If you gotta pee and you don’t have any Euros on you, what else are you supposed to fucking do?? Literally what are your options at that point?
I’m sure some people would do this anyway but I suspect a lot of them can’t/won’t pay for a public toilet and aren’t close enough to a private one. It’s a UX issue
what am I supposed to do? tap my phone and pay .5 usd for the privilege of using a clean-ish toilet in the middle of the plaza. not that big of an issue.
Imo they should be funded by public budgets the way libraries, school buses, roads etc are.
They are, and many low traffic toilets are completely free.
However, in high traffic areas, some arguments they tend to give against this:
- Asking for a small amount of money deters a vandalism because people would only go in there to use the toilet. Not many people would pay to go and trash the place or put some tags in there.
- It’s an easy way to get extra money for maintenance
- In case of drug users it could help because some of them might already spend all their money on the drugs themselves thus making the small cost bothersome. (Although strong blue lights are a better deterrent because they hide your veins)
A lot of toilets in Europe in low traffic areas tend to be free. There’s also quite some open air urinals in heavy traffic areas that are free but they smell horrible.
There’s also some European countries that allow/tolerate public urination but limit it to non-privately owned natural bushes and require you to do it decently. (Not showing any genitals)
If you gotta pee and you don’t have any Euros on you, what else are you supposed to fucking do?? Literally what are your options at that point?
In places where they ask for money you can often plead your case and can enter without paying. Many places also ask for money without actually having somebody present or blocking your entry if you do not. I’ve seen a lot of little plates with cash just laying there without anybody being present.
Clearly not enough easily accessible toilets for people to not pee on the sides of buildings. If the problem is so big that you’re considering designing hydrophobic pisser punisher paint you clearly don’t have enough places for people to pee.
Not so much in London, and usually you need to pay for the public ones.
Yeah, people forget that people is the reason we cannot have nice things.
You know kung-fu?
If enough public toilets were actually provided, this would not be a problem that needs solving.
yeah this is actually about hating the homeless, not about making a city cleaner
While generally a promising approach, in the case of St Pauli, Hamburg it might be different. Yes there are lots of homeless people, but there are also LOTS of randoms going there to get drunk and be on their worst behavior. Its part of the spirit of that place.
Anyways “not by authority” is bs imo. An electrical fence is also “direct feedback”, or razor barbed wire and you wouldn’t dare calling those non-authority
Then they shouldn’t be pissing on walls.
Haha look, we made the man who sleeps in the alley pee on himself!
What a great world -_-
And - well I was going to say surprisingly, but its really not - the post I saw just before this was about transit use and a fear of violence. Which, of course, is ultimately due to not addressing the unhoused.
Right I’m sure the people who piss in our gateway, mysteriously every Friday and Saturday while bellowing at each other, are homeless rather than smashed out of their tiny troglodyte minds.
Hamburg has a vast number of tourists, which makes it even worse, because tourists don’t have to live in the city they’re pissing all over, nor see again the person they flashed because the fumbled pulling up their pants.
If there was a toilet right there, do you think they would still choose the wall?
If they would still choose the wall, do you think the paint is going to deter them?
How will people even know that the paint is piss-splashing paint?
Will people not immediately change their piss angle as soon as they get splash back?
You can’t build public toilets every 50m and make sure it stays clean. Anything further than 50m and a drunk person will just piss to the next wall/bush/corner as they can’t be bothered with finding a proper restroom in many cases. Its not as simple as you make it out to be.
Great, now keep going down the questions I posed.
The point I’m making is that this paint won’t do a thing except cost money.
If there was a toilet right there, do you think they would still choose the wall?
Have you ever been around drunk tourists before? The answer is yes
You have to keep going down the questions, don’t just stop at the first.
No, everyone is 12 now (due to willingly brain damaging themselves or being brain damaged against their will by their brain damaged parents, with stuff like atmospheric lead and unmasked COVID spread).
You have to expect people to believe whatever’s convenient for them and argue in bad faith, until each individual proves otherwise
10 drunk tourist that piss on your wall or 40 people (sober and not) that piss on your wall?
They have walked out of a club with a toilet five minutes ago. How frequently do you want there to be toilets?
The idea is that by putting the risk in people’s minds it’ll be a deterrent, or else by giving people a natural consequence (and also protecting the wall from being stained with piss) it’ll deter repeat offenders.
Keep going down the list of questions, I’ve already accounted for other reasons why this is a dumb idea
When they piss on the piss-splashing paint, it splashes them with piss, so they stop. I believe the point is that it sprays back at all angles.
I’m not claiming it’s a magic bullet, but I am claiming that if you think this is about homeless people you are not thinking about drunk people and tourists, who are the genuine target.
I’m not claiming it’s about homeless people, it just seems like a waste of money to me, and it fails to address the issue of people not having a place to piss.
The paint is merely hydrophobic, all you have to do is piss at an angle and you’ll be fine. It’s not a piss retroreflector. It’s akin to pissing on a waxed surface.
Well, they claim that statistically the problem became less severe, so maybe it does work
Just a logistical question about how this works , does the pee reflect equally in a hemisphere normal to the surface, or does it reflect off the wall like a normal reflection.
If it is option 1, how does that work physically? Is the surface multi-faceted? Even with a hydrophobic surface I would still expect a normal reflection.
I don’t really see what’s so bad about peeing outdoors so long as it regularly rains, and you’re not peeing in a way that will affect others.
I don’t know the details, but as soon as you break up the stream it will not reflect cleanly.
Peeing in a city is always going to affect others - there will be people nearby who don’t want to see and hear it, and unless it is raining at that moment, it will leave a mess that affects people. I believe even peeing in the countryside can cause some negative effects due to nitrogen run off.
Oh, you mean the gross, overcrowded toilet that is typical of clubs? Weird that they didn’t want to use that. I wonder why that could be?
/sarcasm
Guys really don’t care, less so the more they drink. Wall is more convenient than a toilet around the block whether it’s sparkling or not.
No, just a regular toilet in a public establishment. I don’t know anyone who’s thinking “this toilet is gross, so I’ll piss in the fucking street”. I guarantee you noone is wiping down the street with anti bacterial spray.
Toilets can get busy, yet queuing for one is very normal. Have you noticed that no-one sees the queue and goes on the corner?
That’s because this is caused by drunk people failing to plan ahead and then when caught short not having any inhibitions.
Yeah, not everything is about the homeless. Are there actually many homeless in Munich, compared to rude tourists?
Not nearly enough, especially near the transit.
“The transit”? There is transit all over Hamburg and there are three directly outside the Hauptbahnhof.
If people are still peeing in the street there, then it’s not enough.
Stop making excuses. If people are still peeing on the streets they are lazy drunken degenerates.
i’ve seen more studies saying the answer is more free toilets that i’ve seen everyone is just lazy degenerates. in fact. i haven’t seen any studies that concluded everyone is just lazy degenerates. maybe i’m reading the wrong studies?
I don’t understand how hard that is to understand for some people.
I have never met someone who’d rather piss in the streets than in a toilet if given the choice. The answer is always, always, ALWAYS “not enough free, clean, accessible toilets”
You haven’t met enough drunk people.
The answer is drunk people.
I was once walking home with a drunk housemate who pissed in the street a few minutes away from home. Also “clean” does not enter into it. The street is not clean.
A few minutes can make a difference in wet vs dry pants, especially when there’s 15 beers inside you.
Yeah, so the idea that you can have enough toilets to prevent this involves having toilets every few minutes, or every few hundred metres. That’s kind of insane. We should try the paint, or deal with the mess.
So to you it is axiomatic that the problem is insufficient toilets. You cannot understand that there are people - usually drunk - who will not use a toilet unless they are already inside it. It is not feasible to blanket a city in toilets sufficiently to eliminate public urination, so maybe a multi-pronged approach including discouraging people from doing so is more sensible.
We’ve already been doing the later. And how has that been working out?
You are correct, that I cannot understand something that I’ve never seen, or even heard of. I’ve seen shitfaced people stumble into restrooms pretty frequently. I’ve never seen someone say “I know there is a toilet less than a block from here, but I’d rather piss on the wall!”. But I hear the opposite all the time: “Man, I wish I didn’t have to piss out here, but the nearest toilet is a mile away”.
It is not feasible to blanket a city in toilets sufficiently to eliminate public urination…
Citation needed.
I have been walking home with someone who pissed in the street less than a block (I don’t live in the US, we don’t have blocks, but it was a couple of minutes) away from home.
Cmon, use that imagination of yours to go beyond what you have directly experienced.
Remember too that all drunk people have come from somewhere with a working toilet, because places that serve alcohol have toilets.
Maybe the place was closing. Maybe they didn’t need to go at the time. Maybe the toilet didn’t work. Maybe they just pee a lot. Guilty as charged.
Maybe.
All of this means that your proposed method requires toilets every couple of hundred metres between city centres and suburbs. That sounds like a ridiculous waste of resources.
Most of these are not free, according to your second link.
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“justice” lol
