ancient cities

812 Toilets
The industrialization, urbanization, and population
growth of the nineteenth century led to toilet
provision, alongside the installation of sewers,
drains, and water supply. Toilet installation was
undertaken for public health reasons, to reduce
street fouling and the prevalence of water-borne
diseases such as cholera, and from a sense of civic
pride and philanthropy. The first major phase of
public-toilet building in Britain took place under
the 1875 Public Health Act, which also introduced
a rudimentary town planning system. Early town
planning was strongly linked to public health.
Both women and men were involved in the early
town planning reform movement. In the twentieth
century, planning underwent professionalization
and became a male-dominated, governmental function.
As urban policy became more ambitious and
academically sophisticated, planning became separated
from its public health roots. Public-toilet
provision became relegated to low-status technical
departments responsible for waste collection and
street cleaning. The 1936 Public Health Act gave
local authorities permissive, rather than mandatory
powers to provide public toilets. No reference was
made to public-toilet provision in the British Planning
Acts or in other Western planning systems.
Toilet provision was for everyone, but in the
beginning, women’s needs were given far less priority.
In 1900 London, the Leicester Square toilets
provided 27 urinals and 13 cubicles (stalls) for
men and 7 women’s cubicles. Vienna, London,
Turin, and Paris were amply provided with embarrassingly
open wrought iron, male street urinals,
demarcating the city as male space. Whereas men
were “entitled to overflow on the public highway,”
respectable women were not meant to need toilets.
Inadequate provision for women may be seen as a
way of controlling women’s mobility within the
public realm. Public toilets in London were built
underground for reasons of propriety and for easy
access to adjacent sewers and could only be
accessed by steps, restricting access for those with
baby buggies, luggage, or disability.
Nevertheless, well-intentioned local authorities
continued to build public toilets, and up to the late
1960s, no one seemed to question their importance.
Public toilets were even offered by private
property developers as an additional sweetener or
planning gain (zoning bonus) when seeking planning
permission. By the 1970s, attitudes began to
change. Increased car ownership led policymakers
(wrongly) to imagine there was less need for toilet
provision than when everyone travelled by public
transport. Privatization of state enterprises and
cost-cutting led to the sale of public buildings and
reduced provision of public services. This accelerated
under New Right governments of the 1980s
and continues today. Public toilets were a soft target
when savings had to be made because there is
no mandatory legal requirement for provision. The
principles of sewers and drains socialism have been
forgotten, with aggressive privatization of water
and sewerage services taking place throughout the
world.
In Britain, the New Labor government from the
1990s prioritized environmental sustainability policy,
encouraging people to use public transport by
restricting car use, but with little consideration of
the support facilities needed. If the government
wants people to get out of their cars and to use
public transport, then public toilet provision is a
necessity, particularly at transport termini, because
people cannot simply jump into their car and drive
to the nearest service station to find a toilet. But
there is no reference to toilet provision in any central-government
spatial planning policy documents.
Rather, toilet closure is legitimated as a way of solving
the problem of antisocial behavior. Public toilets
are heavily contested public spaces, attracting
all sorts of people, including the homeless, vandals,
and drug addicts, and they are popular locations
for male homosexual activity. The solution is
not to close the toilets but to provide attendants
and more investment to meet the toilet needs of the
general public, while separately addressing the
related social issues.
Major new access requirements have been introduced
under the Disability Discrimination Acts of
1995 and 2005, along with building regulations
and standards reforms, which are comparable in
content to the Americans with Disabilities Acts
and the accessibility codes introduced in many
other countries. Great emphasis is put on the provision
and design of toilets that are accessible for
people with disabilities within different types of
buildings. Because there is no spatial policy guidance,
development plan requirement, or legislation
specifying the location and distribution of public
toilets within urban space, large sections of
the population are severely disadvantaged, and