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

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 reveals the opposite is true.

Embarking on a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto, 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 - that public toilets 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 trans people. 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 cra:ppy?