The Potty Project

Key Takeaway 10 is “rituals and practices get established by emulating peers and are emergent as opposed to ‘top-down.’” Users of a shared community toilet passively co-create and adopt a “fair” system that gets established over time. Homogenous systems start falling into place when people begin imitating each other. For instance, many communities have a system of place-holding in lines, by setting down their water buckets to indicate their place in the queue. Another practice that has emerged in Janta Chawl in Mumbai is the practice of key-mapping, that is, distributing keys to families in the immediate area, in order to keep the toilets semi-private, and to give responsibility to those families to keep them clean.