We tend to think of human waste as a phantom material condition, relayed to the management of urban resources; yet it infiltrates the air and water we breathe. It is a matter intricately enmeshed with the “dirty” physiology of the body and is thus weaved into the ecology of habitation. While ecological systems of the postwar period portrayed the inhabitant as an indispensable part of building ecology, currently this image is dismissed. Environmental concerns promote a conservationist ethic and a list of cautionary daily practices of scarcity. Integrating the body's dirty physiology in the ecology of habitation potentially reveals alternative scenarios for handling waste as a resource in the future of urban environments. This talk seeks to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material upcycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics and excremental processes. It maps and redraws the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production, and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.

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