Where Then Shall We Go?: On Public Bathroom Impermanency and Maintenance

Clustered along the edge of the New Haven Green are rows of portable restrooms, installed as the city’s temporary solution to a long-standing systemic problem. As structures of basic function, they offer neither comfort nor durability: cramped enclosures of thin plastic panels with a small sink and toilet do little to fend off the cold at night. Even their basic utility is overshadowed by deteriorating conditions, which reinforce a stigma of filth and neglect. Yet these barely tended, almost unusable bathrooms remain one of the few public facilities accessible for the unhoused.

Locationally and materially impermanent, these structures are implemented to temporarily manage—rather than resolve—the persistent realities of an unjust system. Such is the central rallying point for activist groups such as U-ACT, which used tents and tarps as makeshift housing and gathering sites, and created cardboard protest signs to assert the presence and demands of the unhoused. Though only a temporary refuge, the encampments on the Green became a cooperative space that addressed the needs of many through the collective labor of students and activists, who together formed mutual aid networks for food, emergency supplies, and community support.

The portable bathrooms on the Green therefore compel architects to consider both the lessons and limits of design. Architecture can dignify the spaces we inhabit and recognize the bodies and needs that shape them. But dignity requires ongoing maintenance after design. A bathroom, then, is fundamentally an issue of housing and class justice, of community reinvestment and structural change. It demands something from all of us, not only as architects but as people accountable to one another.