I was recently on LinkedIn when I saw the City of Boston is hiring a Curbside Transformation Manager.
The job description says the position will oversee “new curbside management practices, policies, and technology” and “will also test and evaluate project management and change management strategies, aimed at improving interagency collaboration, public innovation, and testing of new technology and practices to inform an agile and data-oriented curbside management strategy.”
Only an urban policy junkie like me would read this and think: This is amazing.
Autonomous vehicle technology, delivery, and click-and-collect businesses are transforming our streets. At the same time, people are clamoring for more public space for recreation and relaxation, more space for bicycles and scooters, and safer streets, particularly for children and those with mobility challenges. It’s clear that the old ways of allocating most of our curb space to parking and most of the roadway to cars will no longer work. But are most cities hiring someone to oversee curbside transformation? No. I’m glad that at least Boston is.
But curbs are just the beginning.
As cities grapple with declining commercial real estate values, they’ll need revenue transformation managers. As cities try to encourage neighborhood density and build housing out of office buildings, they’ll need housing transformation managers. As public spaces work double duty on resilience and social connection, they’ll need public space transformation managers. You get the idea.
Cities have changed a lot over the past five years, and yet city administrations have rarely created not just particular “transformation” roles, but an underlying ethos that is all about adapting to new post-pandemic realities.
We’ve accepted parking meters, traffic lights, garbage bins, and all kinds of utilitarian structures in public space. Why not pissoirs?
In 2010, Boston pioneered the concept of New Urban Mechanics, a reference to the nickname for the city’s Mayor Thomas Menino, that created a “civic research and design team” within City Hall. And former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spearheaded urban innovation through his foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, by supporting “I-Teams” that catalyze innovation in cities around the country. Both of these programs have done great work to jumpstart experimentation, pilots, and innovation in cities that have lasting impacts.
But isn’t the fact that they still need to exist — that there is a small cadre focused on transformation rather than a job description-level, citywide focus on constantly updating to new conditions — a sign that cities need a new approach to adapting to the present moment?
Setting government up for transformation
I was recently reading an interview with Rick Cole in the LA Times. Cole has held a slew of roles in local government:
The 72-year-old former Mayor (Pasadena), City Manager (Ventura, Azusa, Santa Monica) and Deputy Mayor (Los Angeles) returned for a third stint at Los Angeles City Hall in 2022, bringing a depth of experience to political neophyte and then-newly elected City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office as Mejia’s Chief Deputy.
After two and a half years in City Hall East, Cole announced last month that he would be leaving his post to focus on the Pasadena City Council, which he joined again last year.
In his exit interview with the LA Times, Cole reflected on how Los Angeles is in a precarious situation — threatened by climate disasters like the recent Palisades Fire, by a declining entertainment industry, by homelessness, and by a lack of attainable housing.
But yet it seemed to me that the problem with LA wasn’t just these clear and present dangers that Cole listed, but the less apparent problem that municipal administrative structure is not set up to handle them.
He said, “We’ve fallen behind the private sector in adapting to the new world of advancing technology and changing demographics.”
Further, the city’s org chart isn’t fostering accountability. Cole said:
What I advocated is designing the city to work in the 21st century, which means a chief operating officer who works for the mayor to make sure the city runs effectively across 44 departments. We don’t have such a person now.
It means a chief financial officer. The responsibilities of a chief financial officer are [currently] divided between four different offices in the city, so it’s difficult, again, to point to one person who’s in charge of keeping the city fiscally sound.
Creating a COO and a CFO are not radically new ideas, and often new mayors embark on restructuring roles and lines of responsibility, but Cole comes back to the ultimate problem being the LA city charter written 100 years ago, which intentionally diffused responsibility and power. How do we set cities up for transformation if they are hamstrung by outdated org charts?
Reforming the administrative state after Elon
Cole’s remarks come at a time when government workers at all levels are under attack from the Trump administration. It’s a hard time to voice concern about administrative problems, and yet to feel ultimately protective and supportive of government.
One of the people who has walked this difficult line is Jennifer Pahlka, author of the book Recoding America, who wrote in a Substack piece:
DOGE has made it both impossible not to talk about government reform, and impossible to talk about it.
She is now helping to spearhead a new fund that will help reform the administrative state:
The Recoding America Fund (RAF) is a six-year, $120 million philanthropic fund (501c3) to reform the administrative state at the federal and state levels and expand American capacity and competitiveness. RAF’s work is grounded in a board-defined vision to restore the core capabilities of government and move to a new operating model — the right people, doing the right work, with purpose-fit systems and test-and-learn frameworks — so it can reliably deliver on its goals.
The fund seeks to help build an ideologically diverse field of state capacity organizations, connect them to each other, fill in the gaps, and help them set ambitious common goals to drive transformational change across all levels of government in this time of unprecedented disruption. We believe that change is coming to our change-averse public institutions, and now is the time to shape that change in the public interest. That ambitious task cannot be the work of just one party or faction.
There are a bunch of phrases and concepts here that give me confidence, like reliably delivering on goals and transformational change in the public interest. It’s too bad this fund is only working at the state and federal levels. We need it at the local level. Indeed, at the lowest level — at the curb.
Let’s talk about pissoirs: the unsung hero of urban design
Nick Aster wrote about pissoirs on his LinkedIn, and I put it on my Substack because it’s brilliant:
Of all the commonalities in life, the occasional need to relieve one’s self while out in public is as universal as it is problematic. It’s not a sexy topic, but it begets a fundamental problem that plagues cities and towns around the world. Anyone who’s ever stood on a subway platform or taken a shortcut through a back alley after the bars close will know this as they’ve seen questionable liquids flow and endured unpleasant smells which shouldn’t be a part of a civilized experience.
I won’t get into the many reasons that American cities have lost public restrooms and the legitimate reasons why random restaurants are often loath to throw their doors open to the public. Those are complicated problems for another time. The reality of the moment is that we’ve got pee on the platforms, the bushes and the street. It’s disgusting at best, a real public health hazard at worst.
“We’ve fallen behind the private sector in adapting to the new world of advancing technology and changing demographics.” — Rick Cole in the LA Times
As summer’s heat now beats down and we spend long nights in the park, a simple solution calls to us. I believe the answer is the pissoir. A “pissoir” is just a fancy name for a public urinal. They’ve been in use for ages in Europe. They’re usually open air, simple in structure, generally male-oriented but highly effective ways to quickly and efficiently deal with our biological necessities when there’s nothing else available.
Stroll through Amsterdam, Paris, Lyon, or Brussels, and you’ll see them. Sometimes they’re sleek and sculptural, other times they’re nothing more than a modest half-cylinder of steel with just enough privacy to handle the situation. But they’re there, and more importantly, they work.
Scattered around Amsterdam, especially the areas crawling with late night ‘stag parties’, are urinals that range from permanent fixtures to ingenious pop-up models that rise from the ground at night and disappear by morning. You might walk around a corner and suddenly find a modest steel spiral or cube, unobtrusive but unmistakable in its purpose.
Paris has long had its own version, famously dating back to the 19th century. The original vespasiennes — named after the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who taxed urine collection (yes, that was a thing) — were little more than barrel-shaped privacy screens. Today’s versions are sleeker, but the principle remains the same: meet the need, reduce the damage.
Some cities have even introduced female equivalents, which is a welcome innovation. That said, the core behavioral issue is disproportionately male, and pissoirs directly address that.
Perhaps most importantly, pissoirs are simple and cheap. Installing one costs a fraction of what a full restroom does. Simple plumbing, no stalls, no high-maintenance interiors. It’s a minimalist solution that gets the job done.
They’re hard to vandalize. No mirrors to smash, no soap dispensers to steal. Just a piece of metal and a drainage system. They’re easy to clean. A quick hose-down, maybe a mild disinfectant, and you’re back in business. Compare that to cleaning up urine from building corners or subway stations, and it’s not even close.
They also deter unwanted activity. Unlike enclosed public bathrooms, pissoirs aren’t places where people linger. There’s no door to hide behind, no space to shoot up or sleep. You go; you go. They solve the problem before it happens. You don’t need police to catch someone mid-stream when you give them a safe, dignified place to go in the first place.
So why don’t we have them in the U.S.? Well, for starters, we’re weird about public space. Americans tend to view infrastructure through a moral lens. We don’t just ask “does it work?” we ask who’s using it, and do they deserve it? Our cities are littered with examples of this — benches with bars to deter sleeping, spikes under overpasses, hostile architecture galore.
The old ways of allocating most of our curb space to parking and most of the roadway to cars will no longer work.
Bathrooms are even worse. We fear the public restroom as a source of deviance rather than a basic necessity. We’ve shut them down rather than deal with the reasons behind their decline. But I digress. Amid the endless cultural debate over who gets to use which bathroom and when, add our liability paranoia, bureaucratic red tape, and a general aversion to anything that feels “European,” and you’ve got a recipe for inaction.
Thus, we’ve got a city where people pee in stairwells and kids step in it on their way to school.
No one’s arguing that pissoirs are beautiful. They’re not. At best, they’re inconspicuous. At worst, they’re kind of ugly. But so what? We’ve accepted parking meters, traffic lights, garbage bins, and all kinds of utilitarian structures in public space. Why not this?
No, the subway platform isn’t going to be made more beautiful with a pissoir slapped at the end. But would you rather look at a modest steel box or stand in a puddle of human waste?
It’s time for American cities to grow up and install pissoirs where they’re most needed. Start with nightlife areas. Music venues. Bar-heavy neighborhoods. Major transit hubs. Parks that host big festivals. Anywhere the human need collides with a lack of facilities. Pair them with female versions. Build them into the streetscape like bike racks or fire hydrants — functional, expected, unobtrusive.
This is a design solution at its best, solving a real problem in a simple way. It’s not about reinventing the toilet, it’s about accepting reality and finding the most elegant solution to a not so elegant problem.
Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.
MORE FROM DIANA LIND’S NEW URBAN ORDER
