Buildings have ways of telling us who they think we are and if or not we can belong in them. They do it through the height of a counter, the absence of a seat, the size of the doorway. They make certain activities easier for some people and harder for others, until the arrangement begins to feel natural and acceptable.
A workplace without a private room for breastfeeding or a nursery, for instance, assumes that care can be left at home. A school without an elevator expects fitness of everyone, and that too, all around the year. A restaurant without a ramp assumes every customer is able-bodied.
Sometimes, designs even have a way of embedding gendered labour in public spaces. Consider something as ordinary as a diaper-changing table. When placed inside a women’s washroom, it may seem like a practical provision, but what happens when a father is alone with his baby? He enters the men’s washroom and finds sinks, mirrors, urinals, and toilets, but no place to change diapers for the child. The building therefore tells a father that engaging in this activity is an anomaly as it is a woman’s responsibility.
This absence too is easy to overlook precisely because the assumption behind it is rooted in patriarchy. Rakhul KR, managing director, Rusmitha’s Ayurveda Clinic, shares, “Earlier, I honestly never paid attention to whether public restrooms had diaper-changing facilities… I started noticing it more after becoming a father and once I had to actually change my child outside the house, I realised how limited these facilities are, especially for fathers.” Ganesh K, co-founder of Studio Zo, admits that despite having been in the construction industry, he is “guilty of not noticing the absence of child changing facilities” until he had a baby.
Gautham Muthuvel, a businessman, adds, “Nowadays, airports are equipped with baby care rooms where parents can change and refresh babies, and there is a separate space for women to nurse babies, too. But besides airports and maybe a few malls, we don’t find this facility anywhere else. We don’t find it in government-run facilities nor in restaurants, oftentimes not even in women’s washrooms.”
Despite flight lavatories being too small in size, a diaper changing tray can be found, but not in the trains run by the Indian Railways. Gautham laments, “Forget old trains. Vande Bharats are all the rage today, right? They say it makes travel comfortable, but not for parents. There is no space for changing diapers in Vande Bharat washrooms.”
Subhiksha, a parent of two, recalls how her recent travels to Coimbatore from Chennai in a Vande Bharat, turned into a “nightmare” with her 10-month-old baby. “I found it really difficult to change a diaper for my son. There was no facility inside. I was forced to use the seat I was sitting in to change him and I could barely stand while doing it too.” Since such situations can make co-passengers uncomfortable or even disgusted, parents find themselves caught between the social pressure to change their baby’s diaper quickly and the need to clean their infant properly and maintain good hygiene to prevent infections.
Of all places, hospitals seem to reinforce that childcare is a woman’s responsibility, exclaims Yeshvanth Suresh, who confesses to having noticed this disparity since his child turned three months old. “I have had to wait outside while my wife had to manage alone even at hospitals. This, sometimes, increases the load on my wife,” he shares, adding, “When my wife is tired, I have taken my son to the car, where I put down a rubber sheet on the back seat and do the needful.” Ganesh shares how he has changed his son’s diapers in park grounds, beaches, and even in the corridors of malls and hotel tables.
The car, however, seems to be a unanimous choice and the only practical option for fathers when they are outside. “The car has often become the most practical option because at least it gives some privacy and is relatively cleaner,” Rakhul says. Relying on a car, however, is in itself a privilege that not everyone enjoys. For parents who travel by public transport or two-wheelers, the only solution is to provide accessible diaper-changing facilities in public infrastructure.
While people may argue that once an infant can stand, it might become easier for parents to change their children inside washroom cubicles, Gautham adds how changing a diaper in curious toddlers often becomes a two-person job. “When they are infants, one person can lay the child, clean, and change them. Once they start moving, standing, or running, it becomes a two-person job; making family changing rooms the only solution,” he explains.
Smritika Srinivasan, an urban planner, talks about why this gap in childcaring facilities exists, and even when the facility is available why it becomes gendered. “I think a lot of building spaces are designed for efficiency — to optimise space without thinking about the actual users of the space. So, curating a space to the needs of the users is missed out on. In high-end restaurants the focus while designing restrooms could be on the aesthetics, maybe,” she ponders.
While Smritika says that when she pursued Architecture a decade ago, the syllabus wasn’t gender inclusive nor gender sensitive, Ganesh adds that although gender sensitivity while planning a building was part of his foundational education in Architecture, it was taught on a “generic level, not at a miniscule level.” “Most of it is rooted in common sense but maybe because there has been a certain way of doing things all this while, it demands architects to actively unlearn.”
Smritika adds, “For a large number of architects, considering a diaper changing station or a family changing room, is not a priority. If accessibility and inclusive designs are all ingrained in students from the very beginning, it’ll help. Otherwise we are designing a city or a place for exclusion. I know that the rules (of architecture) do talk about universal accessibility but it has to be normalised in practice. Inclusivity and utility must go hand-in-hand.”
The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC), within its purview of developing city-based infrastructure has come out with an Inclusive Design Manual, which recommends diaper changing stations inside men’s, women’s, and family toilets. But for all their recommendations to be implemented within their existing city plans and for private facilities to either include in totality or at least let go of gendered views, planners, policy makers, engineers, builders, and even business owners, would need to show collective commitment. It is only then that buildings’ designs would stop reproducing the divisions that contemporary society is fighting against.
