whole interior becomes like the inside of a dishwasher, sprayed and soaped and rinsed top to bottom once a user leaves (or, let’s hope once she leaves – horror stories abound about users being trapped in these selfcleaning toilets, but most of the reports I’ve read are about children who go in alone and can’t unlock the door; the fatalities are myth).
Less drastic automation has invaded everyday public bathrooms, too. Automated electric air dryers control the length of time people get to dry their hands – often too short and then, with another push of the button, too long. The motion-activated versions demand vigorous hand flapping to achieve the necessary drying time. The volume of air cannot be controlled, nor the temperature, though simple discount-store hair dryers have achieved this level of complexity. Soap comes pre-portioned, regardless of whether we need to lather our hands or faces, or clean an explosion of ketchup off a silk blouse. Water flows from taps at a predetermined volume, for a predetermined time, and at a predetermined temperature. Paper-towel dispensers decide the size of sheets we will need. Automated flushers are triggered by light, time, and movement. Irus Braverman writes incisively about all this automation hoo-ha in her essay ‘Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms’ in the collection Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. As Braverman describes it, automated flushers assume ‘a standard person with more or less standard needs engaged in an anticipated standard behavior. So it is a single individual (not with a helper or child, for example) making a single bowel movement (rather than a series) or making typical movements in a stall (not preparing for an injection, for example).’ I personally defy readers – especially women – to tell me they have never been the victim of an automated flusher. So an occasional sopping backside is the price we must pay for automation? But wait, what’s the benefit on our end? Better bathrooms, or so the argument goes, are less subject to some users’ anti-social behaviour, such as clogging and overfilling sinks or not flushing toilets. But aren’t these primarily benefits to the operators? Not the users?
Automated fixtures in public bathrooms may deter human users from messing around, but they are so narrowly controlling, they also deter activities well inside the spectrum of normal bathroom use. I’d like to be able to drink water from bathroom faucets, but what comes out is too cold for tea and too warm for refreshment, and I, lowly user that I am, cannot be trusted to decide the temperature. Even the boon to operators – that automated bathroom fixtures lessen the need for human oversight – isn’t an absolute given. When automated flushers and faucets and hand dryers stop working, no human is there to know except the users, who have, precisely as a result of automation, been alienated from the space and feel no need to go out of their way to report, for example, a non-flushing and rapidly filling clogged toilet.
If there’s a common theme to this book, it’s this: public bathrooms are hard to get right. And no wonder. They are mired in cultural baggage, stuck in the fixedness of fixtures, and bound by massive, often ancient infrastructure. That chest-puffing Victorian desire to provide for the public was long ago flushed away. Governments today see bathrooms as more burden than duty. As I’ve said, in Canada, the US, and the UK, there are no statutory requirements on the part of governments to provide bathrooms to the public. So, where users dare to be too needy, and where inclusive design is hard to achieve, the government solution isn’t to adapt, but to pull the plug.
This is real. Remember, half of public toilets in London, once a paragon of lavatory provision, have closed. The reasons, laid out in a 2006 Health and Public Services Committee investigation into the loss of public loos, echo with the news stories I read every day about disappearing toilets in cities all over: underground toilets, built by well-meaning but decorum-obsessed Victorians eager to provide-but-hide, are too costly to retrofit for statutory wheelchair access. Authorities are similarly cranky when it comes to non-bathroom bathroom behaviour – illicit drinking, taking drugs, or having sex (and don’t forget smoking in the boys’ – or girls’ – room). But instead of working to curb these activities, by employing bathroom attendants, for example, governments shut them down. It’s cheaper and easier to eliminate a bathroom than to work out its issues, and that’s no big deal where governments have no legal responsibility to provide.
But biology’s a killer. People still have to go. Media companies are leaping into the vacuum, providing on-street automated toilets that act as billions-generating billboards. Some businesses provide for immense numbers of users, banking on the knowledge that those who come for the free toilets may stay for the Caramel Frappuccino or the fries. A new bathroom business venture arose in 2014 out of the Airbnb model of people renting out temporary lodging. Airpnp was an app-based service for people seeking bathrooms in a hurry. Private toilet providers – many merely people selling access to their home bathrooms – listed their toilet and the fee for its use (anywhere from three dollars to fifteen dollars for a specified time). Airpnp, which went kaput sometime in 2016, was a far cry from the Victorian allegiance to the public good. Those early stabs at public toilets may have been wilfully ignorant of diverse needs, but at least they were spurred by concern for well-being, not money-making.
We will always produce urine and feces, and we will always, as a society, be forced to find ways to deal with it. Joseph Bazalgette’s original sewer was a city-saver. But London is edging up to a population of nine million, four times the number Bazalgette built his system to serve. About fifty times a year, the system is deluged by rainwater and overflows, spurting raw sewage into the Thames – enough each time to fill a football stadium. The solution is a so-called ‘super sewer,’ a twenty-five-kilometre westto-east tunnel under London, ferrying feces and overflowing stormwater to a treatment centre. It’s the first time Bazalgette’s mid-nineteenth-century plans have been reworked. The super sewer should be complete by 2021 and is promising to take care of the city’s sewage overflow woes for a hundred years to follow. After that? Who knows.
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