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    No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs
    No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs
    No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs
    Ebook226 pages4 hours

    No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs

    By Lezlie Lowe

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    About this ebook

    This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we're allowed to "go" in public.

    Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways - momentous and mockable - public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn's disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don't want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of transpeople. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women's bathroom. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it's clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoach House Books
    Release dateSep 1, 2018
    ISBN9781770565616
    Author

    Lezlie Lowe

    Lezlie Lowe is a freelance journalist and journalism instructor. She has been recognized for her long-form journalism by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Atlantic Journalism Awards. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King's College, where she also teaches in the Journalism department. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs is her first book. She currently lives in Halifax. 

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    • 4/5
      Best for:People with an interest in public infrastructure, but also people interested in how our public choices impact who can enjoy being out in public.In a nutshell:Author Lowe explores the problems with the (lack of) public toilets across many countries.Worth quoting:“I grew up being socialized to expect a line for the bathroom. I spent decades so desensitized to the indignity that I never questioned it.”Quoting someone interviewed for the book: “Public bathrooms are part of that infrastructure, the same way roads and other things are. And if you can’t even get that right, how can we go further?”Why I chose it:I always have to pee.Review:No, seriously, I always have to pee. It’s not a medical issue - I just am often in search of a toilet. When the first round of lockdown restrictions were lifted in England, I was so excited to go for walks further than a few blocks near my house, but we were definitely limited in maybe 30 minutes out, because within an hour (maybe 90 minutes), I would need a toilet, and London doesn’t have loads of public toilets. When I fly, I get an aisle seat. And before I leave the house to do ANYTHING, I always use the loo.For Lowe, the recognition that public toilets are often a bit of a shit show came when she had young children and had to navigate staircases down into dirty, often locked public bathrooms in parks. And for many people with no mobility or other challenges that can make using the toilet more than a simple affair, having children is when they start to realize that there are not a lot of places where literally anyone can go to relieve themselves. In those moment of realization, she decided to explore public provision of toilets.But she doesn’t just think about how people with children are impacted. She takes on how this affects people experiencing homelessness - loads of NIMBY types get super angry about people peeing and taking a shit in the street, but if there aren’t any toilets, where on earth do you expect them to go? Lowe also explores accessibility, and how the needs for some folks are going to be different than the needs of others. She looks at how the compromises city planners make when putting in the rare public toilet make those toilets even worse (think about the pretty gross stainless steel, seat-less wonders found in many parks). And thankfully she also looks at how the strict division of gender in toileting harms trans people - along with people who care for others of another gender who need to use the toilet.On thing that she mentioned that really stuck out to me was how awful it as that so many people who are working don’t have access to toilets during their shifts. Yes, we’ve heard of the Amazon delivery drivers peeing into bottles because they don’t have time to stop. But even if they had the time - where are they going to pee? Where are taxi drivers and other ‘gig’ economy workers who don’t have offices going to relieve themselves? They’re also peeing into bottles. And as Lowe says: “Just imagine any of these solutions applying to the average office worker: ‘Sorry, Mildred, you can’t leave your cubicle today. Just toss your urine out the window. Hope you aren’t on your period. Ta ta.’”It is absurd that society seems to just be … okay with our governments not providing space for everyone to do one of the most basic of human functions. Not everyone can afford to buy a muffin every time they need to take a shit. Not everyone feels comfortable sneaking into a pub on a Saturday evening when the patrons have been drinking all day. We expect our governments to provide services that allow us to live in the world - things like roads that take us into the city center. We should also expect them to provide the services that allow us to actually make use of the city center once we get there.Lowe approaches this topic from so many different directions that it could have been a mess, but instead, it is well-written, well-edited, and fun to read.Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:Keep

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    No Place To Go - Lezlie Lowe

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