I am standing on the Point des Arts in Paris. [...]

What is civilization? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms - yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now.

Kenneth Clark: Civilisation, A personal view, John Murray, London, 1969.

Cemusa Inc, chosen by New York to design its public toilets, has designed them for a number of cities, including Seville, Spain, above.

In Marseilles, some 14 thousand of 32,653 buildings noted in the 1886 census had no system for human waste disposal. Waste was simply accumulated in a potty on each floor and then disposed of in the gutter. [...]

The question was definitively resolved for French architectural theorists, as is clear from the declaration made in 1882 to the Society of Public Medicine by Emile Trélat, founder of the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture:"City dwellers must be carefully protected from their excretions from the moment they are produced. The waste outlet, normally kept sealed, should be opened briefly, and waste should be forcefully expelled from the residence by a powerful stream of water."

A history of private life, Vol. IV (M.Perrot, Ed.), Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1990.

After more than a decade of false starts, New York City officials announced yesterday that they had selected a company to remake the city's jumbled streetscape by providing aesthetic order to its thousands of bus shelters.

Cemusa Inc., the North American subsidiary of a Spanish advertising conglomerate, would install the amenities without charge, and pay a fee, in exchange for the city's permission to sell advertising on the toilets, bus shelters and newsstands. Although these would be the first American toilets for Cemusa, the company has installed hundreds of them throughout Spain and Latin America in the past decade, from Seville to Rio de Janeiro, Cemusa officials said. The company has also built bus shelters in Boston, Miami and San Antonio.

The street project seeks to address an embarrassing shortcoming in a city that prides itself as a world capital with riches aplenty: a lack of public toilets in busy Manhattan business districts. Under three different mayors, efforts to put toilets on city streets have been thwarted by bureaucratic infighting, legal battles and a seeming inability to figure out how a public toilet would function on a New York City street.

Winnie Hu: Deal is reached to put toilets on city streets, NY Times, Sep. 22, 2005.