More Defensive Urban Design: Venice's Anti-Public-Peeing Architecture Features

We all know about hostile architecture/defensive urban design, which is meant to discourage citizens from engaging in a particular activity. Typically we think of horizontal surfaces festooned with protuberances that make them difficult for the homeless to sleep on. Then there's architecture to discourage what we roundly think of as bad behavior, like public urination. In Japan, a historical solution was these bamboo inuyarai, which were reportedly designed to prevent dogs from urinating on the sides of buildings. In Germany, the city of Hamburg has resorted to coating walls with superhydrophobic paint, which causes pee to splash back on the offenders, who in this case are human. Yet another solution comes to use from Venice. In that city, you'll find these masonry protuberances in corners: Those are called pissotte, and are a centuries-old solution for preventing passersby from peeing in corners. They also, the city's tourism board explains, "anti-bandit humps"—they prevented people from lurking in corners, in the era before streetlights.