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 toilets: 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.
The Toilet Manifesto is ongoing at the Nehru Science Centre untilDecember 8.
