Lezlie Lowe
BIO
Where others see everyday public toilets, Lezlie Lowe sees the urge to go deeper.
Lezlie is the author of No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs. She’s Canada’s number one expert on the social meaning and infrastructural importance of public bathroom provision and a sought-after consultant on municipal bathroom strategies.
An engaging and praised public speaker, Lezlie (she/her) is a Halifax-based multi-media journalist and journalism instructor at the University of King’s College. Her work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, CBC Radio’s Ideas, The Independent, The Walrus and The Guardian.
THE TOPICS
Stall tactics: why cities turn a blind eye to public bathrooms
Liveability and walkability are touted goals for many cities, but planners and leaders often lose sight of one crucial component to make their municipalities friendlier: public bathrooms. This talk looks at how cities got here, the myriad social and economic benefits of public toilets, and how cities can approach creating more and better provision for the future.
Urine luck: public toilets as a metric for who matters
Who owns the city? Who gets to use public space? Without well-maintained grids of accessible, adequate public bathrooms, there can be no equitable access to our cities. And citizens — such as those experiencing homelessness, caring for small children, with medical conditions, or who use mobility devices — get left out. This talk looks at “bathroom privilege” and considers how public bathrooms are spaces that reveal not only our cultural neuroses but who matters in our cities and deserves public space, and who, implicitly, does not.
Rage against the latrine: public toilets as a feminist issue
Take a look around. Every concert intermission, every airport, every conference centre, every transit hub, there they are: women waiting in bathroom lines while men heading to the adjacent stalls breeze by. This talk deconstructs those lengthy queues, explaining how the built environment is so often designed by default for men, and showing that it’s not women that are broken, but public bathrooms.
On a roll: toilet walking tours
These 90-minute, all-ability walking tours can be designed for any city. Stops along the way highlight hidden-in-plain-sight barriers to local public bathroom provision and lay out the broader politics and history of access. It’s everything you wanted to know about public toilets but were afraid to ask, on the go.
THE BOOK
No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways — momentous and mockable — public bathrooms just don’t work. No Place To Go highlights the inequity baked in to our cities by way of the most necessary technology of public space: the public toilet, a piece of infrastructure largely ignored by politicians and city planners and too-often simply tolerated by a long-suffering public.
Lezlie is represented by Carolyn Forde for her books.