99% Invisible - 412- Where Do We Go From Here?

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that panic has often been… public bathrooms. The debate about trans bathroom access became a big national story a little over five years ago after the passage of ordinances in cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, and Houston, TX, which attempted to restrict which bathrooms trans people could or couldn’t use. Many transgender, non-binary, and intersex people risk stress and sometimes physical danger when entering bathrooms that are segregated by sex. But a group of people have devised a design solution that may make bathrooms better for everyone. Where Do We Go From Here? Pre-order the The 99% Invisible City

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Sandy Allen is a reporter and a writer. They live in upstate New York and they often go into New York City to run errands and go to meetings. And when they're out and about, finding an accessible bathroom can be a challenge. All right, so I'm on a university campus in New York City and there is a women's room and a men's room, and then a guy saw me sort of waiting to figure out what I was gonna do.

This is a recording I made a few months back when I was in New York City. That's Sandy. This was before COVID, and I kept an audio diary of my bathroom search. He said to me, it's multiple referring to the men's room that he just exited, I think, because he thought I was

waiting to enter it. So, hurry, bathroom. For context, Sandy is non-binary and transgender. In terms of looking, quote-unquote male or quote-unquote female, I land somewhere in between. Some strangers call me sir, others call me maim, and so public restrooms always present this dilemma. In women's rooms, people look at me weird

or say mean things, but I'm often too afraid to go into men's rooms. I'm short, and I have this voice, and I worry that those traits could make me a target. It can feel risky and exhausting to navigate these two bad options. Okay, I'm in the New York City subway, and I didn't find it a bathroom earlier, and it's been hours, and that is pretty difficult, so I'm'm gonna just hold it for more hours. Okay. This particular day in New York I went the whole day without finding a bathroom I could use. And I've been out and about all day I haven't used the bathroom at

all because I couldn't find one. I couldn't find one where I had a meeting earlier and I couldn't find one at my dentist's office. For many trans and non-binary and intersex people, this is the norm, really for anyone who doesn't conform to gender stereotypes. Some folks choose to risk the stress and sometimes physical danger that can come with entrained bathrooms

that are segregated by sex. Others choose not to. Instead, we hold it. Women's rooms and men's rooms, but there was no gender neutral option at all. Okay, bye. It's hard to overstate the effect this has had on my ability to exist in the world. I've stopped going to the gym.

I hate to travel because my local airport doesn't have any bathrooms that work for me. Every trip out to a restaurant or a theater or really anywhere is laced with this underlying feeling of anxiety. And over many decades, this kind of bathroom-related anxiety has been a reality for lots of different kinds of people, not just trans people. Because ever since their invention, public bathrooms have been these sites of conflict about who's included in public life and who's excluded. Before widespread indoor plumbing, public restrooms didn't really exist. Instead, people used the privy, which was basically just a hole in the ground, sometimes with a little outhouse style building. By and large privies were not segregated by

sacks, nor were they segregated by class. The outdoor privy was used by rich and poor alike across the United States. That's Terry Cogan, a professor of law at the University of Utah. He is basically the expert about the history of sex-segregated bathrooms in the US. And he says that it wasn't until the mid-1800s that indoor restrooms started to become a thing. Beginning in the late 1840s and 1850s, cities began developing municipal works, water works and sewerage systems that actually could accommodate indoor water closets. So once that came about, the outdoor privy was replaced by indoor water closets. At first, it was only the very wealthy who could afford this latest in plumbing technology.

Having a bathroom inside your house was a luxury. But gradually indoor water closets became more widespread, and as they moved into the public realm, they entered a world that was at the time shaped by this very popular idea, which was called the Separate by this very popular idea, which was called the separate spheres ideology. And that ideology basically said that women should remain in the home and men's appropriate realm is in public, in politics, working in factories, whatever. And this vision was very, very powerful.

Allowing women into the public sphere was thought to be risky, because given their weakness, they could become contaminated by the vile influence of men. I mean, I'm also worried about being contaminated by the vile influence of men. Yeah, I get it, but what you have to understand is, back then, the idea would have been about literal contamination. It was then considered consensus among scientists who were basically all men that women were weak and vulnerable and susceptible to disease. But women, of course, were not weak, nor were they actually confined to the home.

By the early 19th century, more women than ever were working and getting involved in politics. So one is faced in the first part of the 19th century with this tension, that the cultural ideology said women should be in the home, and the reality was that women were leaving their home in ever-increasing numbers. And American building designers had to find a way to navigate this tension. They had to figure out how to create public spaces that both accommodated women, but still kept up this ruse of women being relegated to the home.

The solution they came up with was to segregate public space. They designed ladies-only train cars and ladies-only dining rooms and waiting rooms. And these spaces were often decorated to look very domestic, with the sort of sofas and wallpaper and drapery you'd see in an upper-middle-class living room. And the thinking was that for those ladies who dare to venture into this dangerous public world, these are protective spaces for them. And so these living, roomy, looking women's spaces became a fixture of public life across

America. And that meant that when toilets eventually moved inside to places like theaters and restaurants, they were also segregated by sex. Gradually, as the 19th century went on, society started to desegregate the sexes. But even as men and women started mixing more, segregated bathrooms stuck around. They're a vestige of this ideology that once insisted that men and women couldn't share public space at all. And one of the reasons that segregated bathrooms have proved so enduring is that these separate facilities were actually codified into law.

The first laws were passed in the 1880s, and they had to do with women factory workers, and how they needed a space where they could rest when their weak female bodies gave out. With its vision of women as vulnerable beings who needed protection. weak female bodies gave out. But the history of public bathrooms isn't just about who is seen as worthy of protection. It's also about who is seen as unworthy. There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that panic has

often been public bathrooms. So yeah, I mean pretty much every decade there's been some controversy about public toilets. This is Professor Susan Striker. She's written, among many works, a groundbreaking book called Transgender History. And she says that for as long as we've had public restrooms, we've had battles about who belongs in them and who doesn't. And she thinks that we fight about bathrooms partly because they're these very charged spaces. We have always to have booze around waste and elimination

and privacy and smell. And it's very difficult for people to think rationally about some of these things. We just react at an emotional level. And Professor Striker says, pick a moment in 20th century American history, and chances are there was some sort of freak out about some group of marginalized people using the bathroom. With the rise of more visible gay and lesbian communities in the years after World War 2, there were

panics about gay male sex and public toilets. There was a sense of gay men being predatory, you know, to straight men. By the 1950s and 60s, activists began challenging codes of racist segregation in the South. This included challenges not just to racially segregated water fountains, lunch counters, and buses, but to racially segregated bathrooms. If you think back to any signs that you might have seen from the battle days of Jim Crow, it was not uncommon to see public coilets labeled men, women, colored.

With the rise of the feminist movements, you saw in the 60s and 70s, particularly around efforts to pass the Equal Rights Amendment that you had right-wing people who were opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment saying, oh, they're going to require unisex bathrooms. Already we go to the same bathrooms on airplanes and buses. Does this mean that with the Equal Rights Amendment, if it is passed, that there will no longer be men and women on the doors, but us or we or whatever?

Well, that's... By the 80s, you know, you have the AIDS crisis. It's a disease first detected in the gay community that has now spread beyond that. A disease. And, you know, there was another wave of panic around public toilets. You're gonna get AIDS there.

The ADA ensures access to public toilets, you're going to get AIDS there. The ADA ensures access to public accommodations such as restaurants, hotels, shopping centers, and offices. The Americans with Disabilities Act is passed in 1990. And again, there's a wave of, oh, it's going to be too expensive and why do we have to accommodate those people? Which brings us to the bathroom-related panic of today, which is about people like me and like Professor Striker.

A moral panic around trans people. Today, the legal battle over which bathrooms transgender individuals can use in North Carolina is becoming more heated by the day. This debate about trans-bathroom access became a big national story a little over five years ago. You had ordinances or proposed ordinances in states like North Carolina and Texas, which attempted to restrict which bathrooms trans people could or couldn't use. Terry Cogan thinks this surge in anti-trans-bathroom activism has something to do with the Supreme Court allowing for gay marriage in 2015.

After that happened, all the conservative money and energy that had gone into that fight had to find a new target. This conservative energy coalesced around trans people and their desire to use the restroom that accords not with their birth sex but with their gender identity. People on both sides of this debate claim that they're on the side of safety. One side says, hey, trans people deserve bathrooms where they can feel safe. The other side says women shouldn't be attacked in the bathroom by cross-dressing men. But as Professor Striker describes, this notion of a predatory cross-dressing man is a fiction. That fear is completely phantasmatic. It's like, show me the police reports of cross-dressed male sex predators in public toilets. It's like, I don't think you can find one.

It's a fear, it's that effect. In reality, if you look at the numbers, it is trans people who are at greatest risk of being attacked in public restrooms. According to Professor Kogan, if you look at surveys of trans people. The number is roughly 70% have experienced either verbal or physical abuse, and among some populations, in particular, black trans women, the level of abuse is much higher.

I sometimes find my friends who aren't queer really don't seem to understand just how dangerous public restrooms can be for me. How every time I want a pee or wash my hands, I do a calculus about my likelihood of being endangered by some random person. I don't know a trans person who doesn't have a story or many about being harassed by a stranger. Like, I was talking with Seb Chah,

who's an architect in South Carolina, and they told me this story about going to a swimming pool with their partner. After getting exercise, you went to go use the sauna, because sauna's a great. But Seb faced a problem, which was there was a locker room for women

and a locker room for men. I was already kind of apprehensive because I'm trans non-binary. So Seb and their partner picked the women's room because that was for them the better of the two available options. I knew that I could probably come up against some friction, but I felt a responsibility to use the sauna, where I felt like I belonged more.

We were in the sauna for a little bit, and this middle-aged white woman enters, and asked me to leave because she wants to use the sauna. And I calmly told her that she was welcome to join and use the sauna with us. And she kind of left it a half and brought back this male staff member who asked me to leave. Everyone watched as Seb was escorted out of the locker room. It was humiliating, it was isolating, it was also for a trans person, an entirely ordinary experience.

Like, this kind of thing happens to us all the time. And it's generally a pretty horrible feeling of exclusion just trying to use the sauna. It's the most mundane stuff that we have to think twice about, whether to swim, whether to use a changing room. Even for somebody like Professor Striker, who's lived out of the closet for decades. I transitioned surgically and socially back in the 90s. I still look over my shoulder when I go in to the women's room. Every single time, it's like, hmm, is somebody going to notice something? Are they going to freak out? Is this going to be a scene?

A lot of us who are trans going to call it the tax. You know, it's part of the tax you get taxed just for walking around being trans in the world. And part of the trans tax is like always being mindful of moving into those sex-segregated spaces. moving into those sex-segregated spaces. But even though we take it for granted that most public restrooms are segregated by sex, they don't have to be this way. And as the debates around trans-bathroom access began heating up, one architect began thinking about exactly that. My name is Joel Sanders.

I'm an architect with a practice based in New York called JSA. Joel had long been interested in bathrooms. As a gay man during the height of the AIDS epidemic, he remembered how public restrooms had become a flashpoint back then. And he was especially interested in the lack of attention his fellow architects seemed to pay to these spaces. I think for society, the bathroom is the ultimate sort of functionalist architecture. It doesn't require design, it doesn't require creativity.

But the reality is, is that bathroom design does matter, whether architects realize it or not. When they design public bathrooms, they're deciding who's included and who's excluded when it comes to fully participating in public life. Joel figured if they put their minds to it, architects could reimagine bathrooms entirely. And so I picked up the phone and I reached out to a colleague of mine who I'd met many, many years before named Susan Striker. What a coincidence. Susan Striker was just here, let me go get her. You know, we just started talking, you know. We would, you know, have long rambling phone calls with each other about it.

And in these calls, Susan and Joel started identifying all the ways that bathrooms suck to use an architectural term. Not just for trans people, but for pretty much everyone. I think that public toilets don't work well for most people. They could be people who are breastfeeding. People who might need to do medical care of some kind, like maybe they need to take their insulin. People with urinary tract infections.

You know, the dad who's got the daughter and he doesn't want her to go into the bathroom by herself. Muslims who perform bathroom evolutions. There's also the problem of unequal bathroom lines. You go to the theater and an intermission. You know, there are huge lines of women waiting and smaller if no lines in the men's room. The buildery term for this is overload.

Then there are the problems many people with physical disabilities have with public restrooms. Joel Sanders was introduced by a mutual friend to Quimelle Aroio. He uses a wheelchair and used to advise the New York City Department of Transportation about accessibility. He met up with Joel for dinner. And it was an instant love fest. I mean, we spoke for hours. Quimelle detailed all these horrible experiences he'd had with public bathrooms.

Like, when he was at an airport and had to search everywhere for a stall that was big enough to fit his chair inside, and in the end, he couldn't. And I ended up having to use a stall and lead the door open behind me because I literally couldn't shut the door behind me. And then there are the horrors of public restroom sink design. I spoke about how pissed off I'd get when I'd use a sink and because it was a flat top surface, the

water would drip down onto my pants. When Mel sees all this bad design as a failure of imagination, so many of these quote unquote accessible bathrooms still don't get it. And they don't get it because they're being designed by people who don't understand accessibility. And so Joel Sanders kept imagining what an actually inclusive public bathroom might be like. He kept talking to Susan Striker on the phone and the two began meeting up and then collaborated on an academic paper and then... To make a long story short, we received so much interest in the design community and really in the general public that we founded Stald. That's Stald with an exclamation point, as in the bathroom stall, but also how this whole

bathroom debate is totally stalled out. The Stald project would tackle not merely the problem of trans-bathroom access, but totally reconsive of the bathroom so that it works way better for way more kinds of people. But Susan and Joel quickly hit a big snare. The code. Right now for public buildings over a certain size, the building code mandates that you must build what are termed separate facilities, meaning a women's room and a men's room. We could come up with design solutions, but unless they're legally implementable, they're building codes, and laws and public policies, they're not going to happen.

So, they called up the country's foremost thinker on laws about bathrooms. They needed someone who, in a sense, could deal with the legal issues. Terry Cogan was thrilled when he got this call. He told me Joel and Susan were actually two of his intellectual heroes, and so he jumped at the chance to join the project. And then Joel happened to meet Seb. I was introduced to Joel after the lecture by a friend who knew him. Seb was graduating from the Architecture Program at Columbia, and Seb joined the project too as did Quimelle. I believe that people want to be invited to participate.

These people are coming together like the Avengers of inclusive bathroom design. It's the Avengers, but more queer and about bathrooms. And so the stall team at last assembled got to work, fighting their arch-nemesis, sex-segregated bathrooms. Terry and his colleagues began spearheading illegal appeal to change the code, and the architects got to work totally re-envisioning designs for certain public bathrooms, like once for elementary schools and once for airports. Why airports? Because it seems to be a place where there's a high quantity of diverse bodies, spending a lot of time and

also having to address their embodied needs. In totally reimagining the airport bathroom, the first thing this old team did was get rid of the idea that the bathroom is a room with a door. Instead, the airport bathroom is now conceptually an extension of the public space, like a big lounge. This space is then divided into three activity zones. So activity zone number one is grooming, and they're proposing a counter. But not just a counter at the height of a standard able bodied adult, but one that

unrelates at different levels. With mirrors also of varying heights, and it would allow people of different heights and abilities to groom together a public space. Activities zone number two is hand washing. Doing away with that traditional countertop, that Coimel Arroyo and other wheelchair users hate so much. Instead of individual sinks, stalled proposes a water wall with a splash plane that's angled slightly away from the user.

It would not be at one standard height, but it would be at multiple heights, again, to accommodate children, elderly, different body heights and weights. The water itself would be recycled to water plants, which would help bring a sense of calm to the space. Which brings us to activity zone number three. A kind of continuous wall of differently sized stalls. And again, it's key that they need to be of different sizes. Some would be standard.

Others would be larger for people with mobility issues, people in wheelchairs. And the stalls would ideally be totally floor to ceiling to provide maximum privacy. The stall bathrooms include other details that would make them more welcoming for all kinds of people, like foot washing stations for Muslim people and floor materials that make the space easier for people with vision impairments to navigate. All of this is more inclusive, and it's also safer, because instead of being divided

into two or sometimes three groups, men, women, and disabled, in this reimagined bathroom, all people can monitor a single common space. One quickly sees that these are open spaces which provide, in a sense, double the eyes on the street. So these bathroom avengers had defeated one foe, the idea that public bathrooms could only ever be sex segregated. But that left one more front in this war, the legal one, the battle between Terry Cogan and the body that governs the building code. Virtually every state and municipality in America and in many foreign countries is governed by a model code called the International Building Code. The International Building Code, or IBC, is governed by a group of builders, architect,

city planners, and other design experts who together make decisions that hopefully keep the public safe. Rules about stuff like light switches and handrails. This group gets together every three years to agree to changes to the code. To account for technological innovations and building innovations whatever. Terry and the other lawyers involved with the effort appealed to change the line of code requiring separate facilities. Terry told me there are some very practical, build-ery arguments that you can make in favor of inclusive design. You don't necessarily need to appeal to people's sense of equality. An all-gender multi-user restroom

is a much more efficient use of space than sex-separated restrooms. They prepared their arguments for the committee in the lead-up to the big meeting about amending the code in the fall of 2018, then came a long wait until the decision finally became public this spring. And... And then in the next iteration of the code, the multi-user type that we champion will be code compliant. Meaning in the very dry language of code compliance, they won!

So, starting soon, architects and builders will have greater freedom to choose this kind of bathroom. They won't be required to build sex-segregated bathrooms anymore. This development is a major step towards having more inclusive bathrooms in the world, but with some caveats. Like first off, it'll take some time for that new code to actually be adopted by local governments. And governing bodies at the city and state levels could also purposefully choose to ignore this particular update.

Now, they don't have to adopt it. Hookline and sinker. So, they conceivably could choose to leave out this exception. So, there is a chance that this single line of the building code could become a flashpoint, a new front in the culture wars. I guess my hope is that people will look at these redesigns and realize that this just makes so much more sense for everybody. Like, Sanny, I want this bathroom. Totally. It makes me think of something that Susan Striker said. What I feel is so elegant about the Stalled Public Toilet project is that at some

level, it just, it doesn't matter. Like, it doesn't matter what most people think about, trans people, it doesn't matter. If you feel like you should accommodate people with disabilities, it's like, by the design of the space, it just solves the problem. And like, of course, I'd love if all people recognize that I am a full person deserving of rights and respect. My dream is to be walking down some airport terminal and to stumble upon a multi-user inclusive restroom

like the stalled one. I picture entering it, seeing that mirror of varying heights that unrelating countertop, the water wall, the plants. I envision entering one of those single-user stalls and locking it behind me. But you know for now, I'll just take a bathroom I can use. All right, I'm at Grand Central Station. Very beautiful. There are no bathrooms for me. I also wanted to buy a sandwich to eat on the train.

And realized I won't be able to wash my hands first. So I bought some purel and I'm going to put 10 that's like washing my hands. Okay, that's it. Music Okay, that's it. Coming up after the break, Sandy and I will discuss bathroom signage and the's wearing a dress. And that's the man's a dress wearing figure, and that's the man symbol and the woman symbol. But in like a really outdated stereotype you sense, it's like a picture of the concept

of the binary gender. Well, that and, you know, even the most retrograde human alive today doesn't associate women with just wearing dresses. I mean, even if you were just to buy into the gender binary, wearing dresses is not just like this hallmark of womanhood, anyway. Yeah, so it's like gender in a 1950s sense. Totally, totally.

But it's something, you know, I've seen so often, and I think that maybe my sensitivity to it is sort of diminished because I kind of take it for granted that it is what it is. Right, and that's because it's pretty much everywhere, right? Like there are some variations, but across the US and my experience at least pretty much everywhere, it's some play on men's women's,

ladies and gents, you know, cowgirls and cowboys. Right. And it raised these questions like if we're moving towards more inclusive public restrooms, why not more inclusive public restrooms science? Like what would they look like? Exactly. And this is actually something that the Stalled team has thought about. How do we make a sign that's genuinely inclusive?

And so they started out by analyzing the signs that are already out there. And one interesting thing they found is that bathroom signage really varies by geography. Here's Seb Chuggan. Like in many European countries, the restroom signage just says WC for water closet. And that's sufficient. We've been doing research on restrooms in South Africa and in other countries where the sanitation system is not at the Western standard and a lot of those times signage is sometimes not even present.

So I think it's important to remember that when we're talking about gender binary signage, it's definitely culturally and geographically relative. Yeah, and this is something I've definitely noticed. I mean, because where I live in the Bay Area, you do see some signs that don't rely on the gender binary for sure. Yeah, that's true. In some parts of the country, those liberal west coast cities, especially you'll see places turning single user stalls into what are sometimes labeled all gender restrooms. Or sometimes you'll see a sign that includes a male figure and a female one and a wheelchair,

maybe accompanied by a phrase like gender neutral. I would say our team doesn't think that's the ideal sign either, because we're not really gender neutral. We don't want to neutralize gender because there are such rich expressions of that identity. And also of course, such as reinforces the gender binary by having that male and female figure

and also others and segregates the wheelchair user, which is kind of this non-human character almost. It's not male, it's not female, it's this other category, almost like colored bathrooms where colored was its own category. And so as they did their research, what started to become clear to the stalled team was that wherever designers tend to rely on avatars, human

figures, it seems like the icon will always fail to capture the complexity of humanity by implicitly leaving some folks out. In general, stalled does not advocate for using those gendered human avatars in bathroom signage at all. And instead, we advocate for inclusive restroom signage to use fixtures of what is included in the restroom, which can be as simple as a toilet icon. That's the huge revelation. Make the icon a toilet.

I mean, it's really obvious. So the end of the day, if there's one piece of equipment that you expect to see in a public restroom that you really need, it is a toilet. So why not just depict a symbol of that? Yeah, and perhaps you'd want that sign to include other fixtures as well, depending on the situation. You can include other things, like a baby changing station or a sink icon. And I think this also makes the restroom more inclusive, not only by just saying clearly what is inside this

room you're about to enter, but also to not prioritize certain languages over others. Something that Seb points out is like, this doesn't have to be some top-down exercise where architects dictate to society what signs should be like. I see plenty of trans-inclusive signage on the internet of unicorns or aliens and saying whatever, just wash your hands or clever ways to denote that whoever is included. I honestly celebrate that and I don't want to flatten the creativity of graphic design by having this singular universal sign of a toilet that everyone has to use. I think it's fine for smaller establishments

to get creative with it as long as it's inclusive of everyone, but I think just as a best practice, a fixture is better than a woman in a dress. Oh, totally. I mean, anything's gotta be better than a woman in a dress. I do kind of wonder about that some of the really creative iconography could be a little flippant for something that's pretty serious. Like if you have like, you know, the man symbol, the woman symbol, and an alien symbol as if people don't finish those or aliens.

You know what I'm saying? Absolutely. And that's something we talked about. And I think it's all about exactly are you being inclusive? And if you're making a man, woman, alien unicorn, you're ultimately, it's offensive, right? So I think it's like, it has a lot to do with like, taste and how people are choosing to, you know, I think really take that advice of opting to depict what's inside this room, rather than what sorts of bodies are allowed to use it. Yeah. Yeah. But it does seem like this is a really good moment to think about it as we're sort of like

entering public life a new kind of from this period of time of being kind of closed up in our own homes. It could be moment to have that kind of exploration right now. Yeah, something I've been thinking about is this is actually maybe a moment for small business owners, for example, to think about how to make their bathrooms more inclusive. And if you're one of those listeners who's actually seen an interesting, gender inclusive bathroom sign, take a picture of it and tweet it at us at 9iMPI.org.

And we're going to be collecting some unique samples and, you know, how people approach this design challenge. Well, thanks so much for talking with us, Andy. And thanks so much for the story. It's just been really illuminating and I learned so much and I really appreciate it. Thank you. Sandy Allen is an author. Their book is called A Kind of Miraculous Paradise. Learn more about their work at hellosandyallon.com 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Sandy Allen. Edited by Senior Producer Delaney Hall.

Music by Sean Riel. Sound mix by Bryson Barnes. Special thanks this week by Sandy Allen, edited by Senior Producer Delaney Hall, music by Sean Riel, sound mix by Bryson Barnes. Special thanks this week to Vanessa Gonzalez, Martin Gonzalez, Andrea Smarten, and the whole team at Stalled. Kurt Colstead is the digital director of the rest of the team, is Vivian Leigh, Chris Baroube, Joe Rosenberg, and it fits Gerald, Katie Mingle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations around North America, but in our hearts will always be. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California.

We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Fun mall at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99pi org, who on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find out how to pre-order the new 99% invisible book. It's called 99% Invisible City. It's out October 6th. It's all there at 99mpi.org slash book. And for all your other 99mpi needs, look no further than 99pi.org. Radio to be on. From PRX.