The original note, as written at the time
How about a modern day luxury for our hot cities. Lavish public showers where citizens can retire from the hot days, or break from the hot days.
Ongoing development
How about a modern day luxury for our hot cities. Lavish public showers where citizens can retire from the hot days, or break from the hot days.
I keep coming back to the shower because it is the one domestic comfort we have decided, collectively and without ever discussing it, that a city is not allowed to provide. We will build a fountain. We will build a monument. We will spend a fortune on a plaza that nobody can sit on because the stone is too hot by ten in the morning. But a place where a person who has been working in the sun all day can wash, properly, in hot water, with a door that closes — that we treat as an absurdity.
And yet think about who actually needs it. Not the person with a bathroom. The trader who has been on the street since six. The boda rider. The loader at the market. The student who has a shared latrine and a jerrycan. The visitor who has been walking since morning and has a meeting at two. These are not marginal people. They are most of the people who make the city function, and every one of them has at some point needed exactly this and gone without it.
There is a hospitality argument, which is that a city that offers clean water and a place to change is a city that visitors speak well of. But the stronger argument is not about visitors. It is that we have quietly decided comfort is private property, and then we complain that public space is only used by people with nothing else to do. A shower costs less than a fountain and it produces a different kind of citizen — one who arrives at the next part of the day clean, and therefore one who is treated differently by everyone they meet.
So let us be lavish about it. Not a concrete trough behind a wall. Proper cubicles, hot water, a place to sit, a mirror, somewhere to leave a bag where it will still be there afterwards, and staff. If it is worth doing it is worth doing to the standard of a hotel, because the whole point is that the person using it is entitled to the same dignity as the person who checked into the hotel.
Whenever you can spend money on quality space, do. All our problems and opportunities happen in space. A shower is not a small thing if the alternative is a day spent uncomfortable and a life spent being looked at as though you are.