Street furniture and defacement nomenclature: a reference crosswalk

Version 1.2.0 · updated 2026-11-05 · data under Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab), text under CC BY 4.0

Benches, utility cabinets, bollards, street lights, manholes, signs… Every public-space stakeholder describes them in their own words. This page proposes an open nomenclature of street furniture and its defacement, cross-referenced with existing references: OpenStreetMap, the French PCRS standard (CNIG), national geo-standards, INSPIRE, CityGML, computer-vision datasets and city inventories.

Contents

1. Why a shared nomenclature?
2. What exists today
3. Gaps
4. Design principles
5. Supports
6. Defacement
7. Attributes
8. Data collection guidelines
9. Downloads, licence and contributing
10. Sources

Street furniture and utility equipment are everywhere, yet no two inventories look alike. Many trades need to name the same objects the same way:

• Maintenance and cleanliness: knowing which support was tagged, covered with stickers or fly-posters, and how often.
• Works and utilities: in France, excavation declarations (DT-DICT) rely on the PCRS large-scale street map, whose utility surface fittings (cabinets, manholes, valve covers…) are a key layer.
• Accessibility: bollards, poles and postboxes are obstacles on pedestrian routes.
• Open data and AI: merging inventories and training image-recognition models require stable, unambiguous categories.

PCRS (CNIG, France)

The Plan Corps de Rue Simplifié is the French national standard for large-scale street mapping (version 2.0, validated in 2017, since extended by annexes). It describes utility surface fittings with a nature list (01 gully, 02 box/cabinet, 03 manhole/chamber cover, 04 connection/valve cover, 05 fire hydrant, 06 pole, 07 lighting column or bollard) and a network code aligned with NF P98-332 (ELEC, ELECECL, COM, GAS, AEP, ASSA…). However, street furniture has no dedicated class: it is drawn as untyped "habillage" (dressing). A CNIG working group on surface fittings has been active since 2025.

Other CNIG geo-standards

The street accessibility standard lists obstacle types (grate, gully, pole, bollard, postbox, street furniture…). EclExt and StaR-Elec describe outdoor lighting (light points and their supports: column, pole, wall, bus shelter, sign…). The ACEN schema covers furniture in natural areas (seats, tables, bins, fountains…).

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is the de facto international reference, and very detailed: amenity=bench, barrier=bollard, highway=street_lamp, man_made=street_cabinet + utility=*, man_made=manhole… Its tags are documented on the OSM wiki and used on millions of objects.

City inventories

Several French metropolitan areas publish their street furniture as open data (Paris, Lyon, Rennes, Bordeaux, Nantes, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Lille…), each with its own structure: a single type field, a four-level coded hierarchy, CAD layers, or one dataset per object type.

Standards and international references

AFNOR and European standards cover specific objects (EN 40 for lighting columns, EN 12899 for vertical road signs, NF P99-611 for public toilets, EN 13198 for precast concrete furniture) without an overall typology. Internationally, CityGML (CityFurniture module) and INSPIRE provide a few values (street light, fire hydrant, fountain…), and the Mapillary Vistas computer-vision dataset defines street-object classes (junction-box, street-light, bench…).

1. No national street-furniture nomenclature. PCRS covers utility fittings, not furniture; there is no generic "street furniture" schema on schema.data.gouv.fr.
2. Incomparable local inventories. Bollards dominate one inventory and are absent from another; some "types" are actually models or manufacturers.
3. No description of defacement. Neither PCRS, OSM nor city inventories can express that a cabinet is covered in tags or that a pole carries stickers and fly-posters. In OSM, graffiti=* is reserved for historic graffiti.
4. Objects with no equivalent: façades, shop windows, downpipes or bare poles have no OSM tag, although they are major defacement targets.
5. Blurred boundaries: box vs cabinet, bollard vs post, pole vs street light vary between sources. PCRS itself merges "box, cabinet".
6. Mixed licences (ODbL or Licence Ouverte), which complicate merging datasets.

• Two independent axes: the support (what the object is) and the defacement (what affects it). One support can carry several kinds of defacement.
• Stable codes (e.g. TECH_COFFRET_ARMOIRE, DEG_AUTOCOLLANT): labels may change, codes never do. Each version is numbered and dated.
• Classes recognisable in the field and on photos: a category is kept only if a field agent or a vision model can tell it apart reliably. This is why boxes and cabinets are merged, as in PCRS.
• Type separate from model: the manufacturer or model is an attribute, not a category.
• Normalised attributes: PCRS network code, operator, material, condition; for defacement, area or format, count, offensive content, readable text.
• An explicit crosswalk to each reference, with an honest "—" when there is no equivalent.

Each support is cross-referenced with existing references. Mappings marked "à valider" are still to be confirmed. Codes are kept in French.

Defacement is described independently of the support. It covers additions (tags, graffiti, stickers, fly-posters…), damage to the material and soiling. To our knowledge, no existing reference provides this axis.

Support attributes

• reseau : PCRS network code (NF P98-332)
• operateur : Operator / owner
• materiau : Material
• etat : General condition: good, fair, poor
• modele : Model or manufacturer, distinct from the type

Defacement attributes

• surface_m2 : Affected area (m²), or poster format
• nombre : Number of items (e.g. 12 stickers)
• contenu_injurieux : Offensive or hateful content (yes/no), priority removal
• contenu_texte : Readable text (signature, message, advertiser)
• hauteur : Out of reach (> 2 m): aerial platform needed

• Record the raw GPS position and its accuracy in metres; never replace it with a geocoded address.
• Record the phone orientation (heading, tilt) and, if possible, the object position adjusted on an aerial view.
• Take a context photo (whole object, 3–5 m away) in addition to the close-up.
• Enter the support and defacement as codes from closed lists.
• Keep the original image, unstamped, at sufficient resolution (2,048 px or more).

The nomenclature is published under Licence Ouverte 2.0 (Etalab) and this text under CC BY 4.0: you may reuse them freely, including commercially, with attribution.

• nomenclature.json: the full nomenclature (supports, defacement, attributes, crosswalk)
• supports.csv and degradations.csv

This nomenclature is meant to be shared: comments, corrections and new classes are welcome. We intend to submit it as a data schema to schema.data.gouv.fr and present it to CNIG working groups and the OpenStreetMap community.

• CNIG — Standard PCRS v2.0 (r1, 2019)
• CNIG — GT Affleurants du PCRS (2025)
• CNIG — Standard Accessibilité du cheminement en voirie (v2021-10 rev. 2023-06)
• CNIG — Géostandard EclExt v1.1
• CNIG — Géostandard StaR-Elec v1.01
• schema.data.gouv.fr — schéma CNIG mobilier (ACEN)
• schema.data.gouv.fr — intégrer un schéma de données
• OpenStreetMap Wiki — man_made=street_cabinet
• OpenStreetMap Wiki — Key:graffiti
• OGC — CityGML 3.0 CityFurniture
• OGC — CityGML 3.0 code list examples
• INSPIRE — ElectricityAppurtenanceTypeValue
• INSPIRE — WaterAppurtenanceTypeValue
• Mapillary — Vistas 2.0
• Rennes Métropole — Mobilier urbain
• Métropole de Lyon — Mobilier urbain
• Métropole de Lyon — Corbeilles de rue
• Bordeaux Métropole — Objets ponctuels du PCRS : mobilier urbain
• Enedis — Postes électriques HTA/BT