Good Shit

Abstract

Modern sanitation is a planetary design problem, linking architecture, ecology, and the politics of human metabolism. Freshwater-based plumbing hidden in the walls of our homes and beneath the streets of our cities forms the digestive tract of the built environment, connecting domestic interiors to distant landscapes. This infrastructural apparatus transforms excreta – with nutrients vital to soil fertility – into “waste,” rupturing the reciprocal cycle between humans and the environment. Nutrients lost as effluent leachate are synthetically replenished with fossil-fuel-derived fertilizers, sustaining a globalized, extractive petrochemical industry. In Cape Cod, the consequences of this broken system are acute: septic effluent seeps into fragile coastal ecosystems, fueling toxic algal blooms and endangering human and economic health. Historically, societies worldwide maintained circular human-nutrient systems through the collection and reuse of “night soil,” transforming excreta into agricultural resource. In pre-modern Asian societies, notably, this practice was central to thriving regional economies. Locally, the New Alchemy Institute’s 1970s experiments in closed-loop living on Cape Cod sought to give architectural form to metabolic balance. Positioned within this lineage, this thesis asks: by revaluing excrement not as waste but as nutrient-rich resource, what hybrid spatial forms, community-strengthening economies, and modes of public life might emerge? Good Shit proposes a community-based architectural framework for human excreta composting and upcycling in largely unsewered Barnstable, Massachusetts, articulated across four interconnected scales – public space, domestic, civic, and regional. Through cooperative governance and public participation, it reimagines sanitation as visible, social, and regenerative infrastructure, linking bodies, buildings, and landscapes within a renewed cycle of ecological reciprocity.