An original public service between past and future: Public baths in France and Western Europe – THERMAPOLIS

The methodology adopted is dynamic and comparative: it involves describing the availability of showers in cities in Western Europe today and tracing its evolution since the 19th century in order to highlight the factors that have led to different situations depending on the context and city. The approach chosen is twofold: comparisons are made between Paris and other cities in the provinces on the one hand, and with other European cities on the other, in order to compare situations and identify patterns.

A total of 28 cities were investigated:

- In France: Albi, Amiens, Boulogne-Billancourt, Caen, Carentan, Cherbourg, Saint-Vaast, Deauville, Grenoble, Le Havre, Les Lilas, Lille, Lyon, Marseille, Ouistreham, Paris, Pau, Port-en-Bessin, Rennes, Rouen, Saint-Denis (93), Saint-Étienne, Toulouse, Valence, Villeurbanne.

- In Europe: Brussels, Rome, Turin.

These cities were chosen at different levels of the urban hierarchy (capitals, regional metropolises, medium-sized cities, small towns), but also because of the age, heterogeneity and varying dynamism of their current public shower facilities (which also includes cities without public showers, such as Amiens, where community organisations have stepped in, or Le Havre, where people mainly rely on their own resources). Some towns were added during the course of the field research.

In these cities, we researched archives (municipal, departmental, associations), reviewed press coverage, collected urban planning documents, studied the location of shower facilities within the urban fabric, and conducted interviews with local stakeholders in order to piece together the history of this sector.

To gain a better understanding of how these shower facilities operate today (usage, day-to-day organisation), we conducted lengthy observation sessions, sometimes participating as volunteers, in 32 facilities (municipal baths, association showers, mobile shower trucks). We conducted 105 formal interviews and dozens of informal interviews with people who work for or in these shower facilities: elected officials, service managers, technicians, social workers, receptionists, maintenance workers, association managers and volunteers.

In order to gain a better understanding of the people who use these shower facilities, we conducted more than 80 formal interviews and dozens of informal interviews with users. This qualitative data was supplemented by two questionnaire surveys: one in Brussels (335 respondents) and one in Lyon (95 respondents). Finally, other places where showers or water points are located were investigated: roadside restaurants, marinas, sports centres, and public libraries, in order to assess any misuse of these facilities by people experiencing water insecurity.

Public baths, which originated in the 19th century as part of the hygiene movement, are public or private facilities that allow people to wash outside their homes. They were built on a large scale in Europe during the first half of the 20th century. Their numbers began to decline in the 1960s as housing standards improved. Despite sustained use in the 1970s and 1980s by people still living in poor housing conditions (immigrants, elderly people, large families), many towns and cities closed their facilities. Where they remain, these services are discreet and little known to most residents.

Today, although minimal, the provision of showers in cities is diverse, scattered and disparate, involving various actors: local authorities, associations that run day centres, businesses (gyms, motorway restaurants) and religious foundations. A distinction can be made between cities where municipal provision remains dominant (Paris) and cities where municipal provision has disappeared or is being reorganised. The increase in homelessness, poor housing, and restrictive residency policies for exiles are leading to saturation of supply, but also to a resurgence of mobilisation that is helping to make access to hygiene a public issue. Municipalities such as Lyon, Marseille, and Saint-Denis are reopening public baths, combined with other services (laundry, health) and actors (associations, NGOs).

The need to wash outside the home is linked to a range of situations, from total deprivation of access to water to fragile, unstable or uncertain access, depending on various residential situations (from homelessness to squatting, staying with third parties, in shelters with insufficient sanitary facilities, in personal accommodation without a bathroom, without water, or with damaged equipment), but also lifestyles, relationships to work and mobility. Nearly 80% of users are men.

Shower facilities are mainly known through word of mouth. Their use is determined by the conditions of access (registration, price, membership of a target group). The second determining factor is the opening days and hours, which are insufficient, poorly suited to the needs of people who work or study, and, above all, lack coordination between facilities. Outside of the showers provided by associations or municipalities, people looking for water to wash themselves resort to various makeshift solutions (swimming pools, fountains, public toilets, gyms, port and beach showers, rivers, cemeteries).

On a daily basis, these shower facilities are run by municipal staff, reception and maintenance staff, volunteers and social workers, who, in the face of urgency and a lack of resources, carry out important but little-recognised care work.

The dissemination of the results of the Thermapolis research project has various applications:

- To raise awareness among the general public and political and community decision-makers about the history of public baths and the need today to maintain and redeploy a public shower service outside of residential buildings. To this end, we have produced materials aimed at the general public (conferences, media interviews, radio programmes, a graphic novel to be published in 2026) as well as a 20-page summary for social emergency professionals, which will be distributed from November 2024 following a conference at the end of the programme, where politicians and community leaders will speak alongside scientists.

- Raise awareness and normalise the concept of ‘water insecurity’ or ‘hygiene insecurity’ (as is now the case with the concept of energy insecurity) in order to highlight these forms of vulnerability, better measure them and combat them. Our scientific publications, as well as our past and future media appearances, contribute to this.

- Assist municipal and community organisations in better coordinating their shower facilities, for example by consulting with each other to determine opening hours and target audiences, but also by promoting the care work carried out by staff and volunteers.

This research project has already had scientific repercussions:

- A doctoral thesis, which began at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in November 2025 (Research Ministery funding 2025-2028), entitled "Silent resistance and creative adaptations: an ethnography of the strategies used by homeless people to cope with the constraints of social assistance systems in medium-sized towns "

- A new research project, involving several members of Thermapolis, focusing on public swimming pools (infrastructures often linked to bathhouses, which face the same technical, cost and public service necessity issues). This project, funded for 2026-2027 as part of a PHC Tournesol (France-Belgium) programme, aims to explore and document the importance of local political contexts in the provision of swimming pools and swimming facilities in different areas. Ultimately, the goal is to submit an Interreg project on inequalities in access to public swimming pools in France and Belgium, and the consequences for learning to swim, health and access to leisure activities.

THERMAPOLIS analyzes access to water in cities in Western countries through the example of public baths. The challenge is to know the uses and users of public baths in France and Western Europe, and to identify the past and present functions of these institutions. Thanks to the combination of observation scales and diachronic and synchronic approaches, THERMAPOLIS proposes to better understand the deprivation of access to water and the answers given to it in the neoliberal urban context of Western Europe, affected for several years by the refugee crisis and for several months by the health crisis of the « new coronavirus ». The research crosses an entry through public policies and an entry through the experiences of users and agents. In doing so, this research will highlight the tension between two types of urbanity: the "revanchist" or "exclusive" city, which closes to the poorest and the "solidarity city" sometimes equated to a "just city". Through the example of public bath, the challenge is to understand how solidarity is expressed at different times and in different urban contexts. It also involves analyzing the experiences and trajectories of people with reduced or no access to water.

THERMAPOLIS aims to contribute to three areas of knowledge while combining them:
- The analysis of the experiences and trajectories of the users of public baths will contribute to the knowledge of little studied, often invisible, populations and the scientific consolidation of the notion of "water precarity" by analyzing its articulations with the other forms of precarities or vulnerabilities (economic, family, residential, energy, health, etc.).
- The comparative study of current and past public bath models will demonstrate the importance of local contexts in understanding the history and contemporary issues of urban governance of health and social services, which are public and private and which mobilize new actors and forms of action and management.
- The careers of the public bath studied will finally be valuable indicators of urban changes in their urban, architectural, demographic, social and political dimensions.

THERMAPOLIS is characterized by its disciplinary openness (geography, history, sociology, anthropology, economy, architecture, philosophy) and methodology. To know the populations attending public baths as users or agents, THERMAPOLIS combines the handing of questionnaires, interviews and observation in selected institutions. The archive approach will make it possible to build careers in institutions that take into account the political, social, economic and ideological contexts in which they took place. Conversely, these careers will provide information on changes in lifestyles, representations - in particular of the body, health and hygiene - changes in reception and social policies. The international dimension at the scale of Western Europe (France, Belgium, Italy) makes it possible to understand how, from the original matrix, differentiated situations have been developed.

The research is carried out by a team of researchers specializing in the subject of social vulnerabilities. Partnerships built abroad have made it possible to integrate researchers in Belgium and Italy, who have already obtained funding in their respective countries and will locally pilot their own sub-teams.