An ultra-modern public toilet in Sydney, Australia, has plants growing from its outside walls.Photography by Marcus Gee/The Globe and Mail
During a recent visit to Australia, I became fascinated, maybe even a little obsessed, with how much better its cities are at building and maintaining urban fundamentals such as parks, transit networks and museums.
Sydney’s new subway line: incredible. Melbourne’s growing arts precinct: immense. The botanical gardens in every city: spectacular. Why, I kept wondering, can’t we do things this well?
My obsession grew when I travelled on to New Zealand. With a population just an eighth the size of Canada’s, it too seems to outdo us at urban attractions.
Auckland, its biggest city, has a wonderful complement of galleries, parks, beaches and waterfront walkways. Even Dunedin, a small city on the country’s South Island, has a first-class history museum.
Marcus Gee: What Toronto can learn about transit, museums and parks from Melbourne
Those are what you might call the big things. But as I continued my travels, I became just as obsessed with the little things. So obsessed that I started taking pictures of crosswalks, trash bins and public toilets. It’s a miracle I wasn’t arrested.
Consider the loos. Canadian cities are particularly bad at providing this most basic of urban amenities. Public washrooms are few and far between. Those that you can find are often closed (especially in the winter) and usually gross.
In Australia, they are all over the place. Melbourne still has a few of its early public toilets. These green cast-iron enclosures, reminiscent of Parisian pissoirs, were built in the early 1900s and are protected by heritage laws.
The public toliets in Sydney power-wash themselves from top to bottom after you leave.
But Australian cities also boast ultramodern lavatories. With gleaming stainless-steel interiors, they power-wash themselves from top to bottom after you leave. One that I spotted in Sydney had a green roof and plants growing from its outside walls – hanging gardens, on a toilet.
New Zealand has even more. The smallest places seem to have a public toilet. I came across an especially good example in an oceanside village an hour outside Auckland. It looked as if it had been created for a design competition, with stainless-steel fixtures, a pleasant wood deck and bright red doors with the opening hours posted clearly on them. I couldn’t help thinking of the crumbling, often padlocked washrooms you find at many parks and beaches in Toronto, where I live.
Another little thing: garbage cans. Toronto plops big, ugly wheeled bins in its parks. The ones on its streets are often busted or overflowing. The Aussies and the Kiwis do much better. Theirs are generally sturdy, well designed, attractive and clean. In one town, we saw a woman wearing rubber gloves wiping down a trash bin with disinfectant. That is something I have never in my life seen in Canada.
A garbage bin in Piha, a beach community outside Auckland, New Zealand.
Now consider signs and signals. Australia and New Zealand both have excellent traffic-management systems. Traffic lights with pointed arrows – far more of them than in Canada – tell you when to turn right or left. Multiple signs at intersections and roundabouts point you in the correct direction.
To ensure pedestrians stay safe, well-marked crosswalks are often combined with traffic-slowing speed bumps. The sound of that famous Australian-designed audio signal for the visually impaired – boop-boop-boop to tell you when to wait and tick-tick-tick to go – is everywhere. Parks and trails, too, have first-class maps and markers.
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Clean toilets, good trash cans, clear road and trail signs – little things, on the surface. But they matter. They make ordinary life easier, of course. Even more important, they send a signal: Someone has thought this through.
In modern cities – big, complex, populous places – that makes a huge difference. It helps people feel they are living in an orderly environment, where their basic safety, security and quality of life are taken care of. Failing at the little things, as Canadian cities often do, has the opposite effect. It makes people feel no one is in charge, that no one cares and the place is broken. The result can be a downward cycle of falling confidence, a classic pattern of urban decay.
A clean public washroom isn’t really a little thing at all. It’s a sign of urban success. Australia and New Zealand prove it.