A large
community space rises above what is ostensibly a toilet complex; a buzz of
activity seems to animate the area. It looks and feels like an amphitheatre, so
where then is the toilet? This is one of the design typologies for a public loo
in an informal housing settlement that forms part of a new exhibition on
lavatories for all. “You have to make a relationship with the community, make
them usable, people need to take ownership,” says Mayuri Sisodia, a director
with Mad(e) in Mumbai, an architecture practice whose new exhibition A
Toilet Manifesto opened recently. “Toilet building lacks imagination,” she
says. “We treat infrastructure as engineering, not as something cultural, that
needs to be connected to more people.”
The exhibition was
sparked off by an entry sent originally for a design competition two years ago.
Though they didn’t win, Sisodia and her colleague and co-director Kalpit Ashar
found it was an area that merited further exploration. Following detailed case
studies of five such complexes in Mumbai, they totted up what they found and
proceeded to build a larger framework for what public toilet building could
look like.
In the city,
toilets are maintained by different agencies or non-profits, some are better
maintained than others. Observations their research threw up included missing
water supply, lack of space for caretakers of the toilets and absent sanitary
disposal facilities. Questions they asked included how many people are looking
after a public toilet? How many visitors does it receive? How much is the
charge for using it? Under the Swachh Bharat scheme, the government has set a
target of building 66.42 lakh household toilets, 2.52 lakh community toilet
seats and 2.56 lakh public toilet seats by 2019. But as officials forge ahead
with the execution, is there a unifying guiding principle at work? With their
new exhibition, the architects hope they can suggest one. “We are looking at a
vision for toilets,” says Sisodia. “We hope this can be a holistic
documentation of various typologies.”
They have honed
in on ten types of public toi
lets: ranging from highway and station facilities
to anganwadi latrines and portable loos. Featuring possible designs, a history
of sanitation policies and possibilities, along with different kinds of toilet
technologies, the exhibition hopes to generate a conversation not just on
individual toilet building initiatives, but the wider cultural factors at play.
“Our idea was, how can we transform the public toilet?” says Sisodia. “Can we
change the meaning of the space?” We hope they can.
Source: THE HINDU-5th December,2017
