The Socio-spatial Construction of (In)accessible Public Toilets

This paper examines the rights of disabled people to access public spaces in Western societies through an analysis of the provision of accessible public toilets in Ireland. Providing a critical analysis around the themes of social justice and citizenship, the investigation is based on an examination of present-day planning legislation, interviews conducted with 35 disabled people—19 in the Republic of Ireland and 16 in Northern Ireland—and a case study of one particular town, Newbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. These data reveal that in Ireland and the UK, planning legislation is weak and often not enforced. Accessible public toilets are few and far between; those that do exist are often poorly designed; and, this lack of provision severely delimits the daily spatial behaviour of disabled people. This lack of provision, it is argued, is expressive of a wider set of ableist power geometries and signi es that disabled people do not, as yet, have the same civil rights as non-disabled people. 1. Introduction Geographers and others have recently started to document how space is socially produced in ways that deny disabled people the same levels of access as non-disabled people. Adopting a largely critical position, they have sought to expose both the ways in which disabled people are excluded from full participation in society through the social production of space; and, the spatial manifestations of unequal social relations (see Kitchin, 1998). It is clear that, despite varying approaches to the study of this subject, researchers agre