Utopia, or a Pile of Sh*t
For many, utopia (ού-τόπος, meaning “no place”) is a ghost. Its shadow has haunted every city from Plato’s ideal polis to the present. As Tony Vidler argued, architecture cannot escape utopia, and perhaps, utopia is the only reality. It is through its power that impossible houses can be inhabited, impassable voids traversed, unspeakable languages spoken, and logical contradictions resolved. Perhaps this is the ultimate truth: that ideal space has more validity than real space.1
And yet, as much as utopia is an abstract idealization of thought—a vision of social governance projected on space—when built, it is a machine for extracting and processing matter. Plato’s ideal polis is also a “city of pigs.”2 When Claude Nicolas Ledoux was building the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, the Ideal City of Chaux was reshaped by forests, workers, taxation, salt production, canals, and regional economic organization. The city confronted its metabolism. Within the intellectual constructs of order, monumentality, and ideal citizens, bodies—animals, humans, and others—had to eat and excrete.
The Royal Saltworks enclosed social bodies for the production of salt, making metabolism a problem of governance within a delineated perimeter. The boundary separates internal order from its surroundings, rendering bodies, matter, flows, and movements subject to regulation. Strangely, this type of confinement has become fundamental to industrial modernity. Data farms, logistics centers, fulfillment campuses, petrochemical complexes, solar farms, wastewater treatment plants, industrial greenhouses, semiconductor megafabs, and server/crypto-mining campuses, all concentrate operations and their metabolism within a boundary, where input and output is strictly controlled and governed. Confinement establishes authority: what belongs inside, what remains outside, what may enter, and what must leave.
The dominant organizational models of industrial agriculture—large-scale industrial facilities where animals such as chickens, pigs, cows, or turkeys are confined at high density for extended periods in order to maximize production efficiency—are strikingly similar to the ideal city’s pigs. CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are framed as resource-efficient systems of mass production, producing large quantities of animal protein with comparatively lower inputs per unit of meat, eggs, or dairy than more extensive farming systems.3 But the concentration of animals produces another arresting concentration: of excrement. Manure, which would otherwise be dispersed across grazing land as fertilizer, accumulates within a restricted territory and requires a colossal infrastructure for its collection, storage, treatment, and eventual redistribution.4 Across the vast cattle feedlots of Texas, the ground itself is engineered through feed alleys, graded surfaces, drainage channels, settling basins, retention ponds, and other waste-containment structures.5 Seen from above, these enormous geometric fields and artificial bodies of liquid waste appear uncannily like plans for ideal cities. With manure lagoons in the shape of utopia, CAFOs epitomize contemporary metabolic landscapes, combining living bodies with industrial repetition and waste concentration. The ideal city returns, strangely, as a landscape of confined animals and accumulated shit.
The environmental implications of these fecal ponds are enormous. A relatively small CAFO can produce quantities of urine and feces comparable to those generated by a small city. The lagoons are also planned to retain excrement for six months to a year, in order to eventually spray it onto adjacent fields as fertilizer.6 Therefore, the manure lagoon is not just an industrial system to concentrate shit, but also to delay it in time and postpone its disposal. Most importantly, manure lagoons leak. Nitrogen, phosphorus, pathogens, and other contaminants reach surface and groundwater through runoff, overapplication to fields, and extreme precipitation events, contributing to eutrophication and harmful algal growth.7 Its metabolism also pervades the atmosphere, releasing ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, methane, odors, particulate matter, and other airborne contaminants.8 The lagoon does not contain shit so much as temporarily hold thick, toxic matter within a much larger geography. What accumulates eventually moves elsewhere—into the atmosphere as gas, into fields as fertilizer, into water as nutrient or pollutant, and increasingly into energy systems as methane.
The manure lagoon is not simply engineered storage, a place where animal excrement happens to end up. It is an infrastructure designed because industrial animal agriculture has broken the territorial relationship between excrement and the land capable of metabolizing it. The pile of shit, then, is not the opposite of utopia, nor evidence of its failure. It is part of the same spatial apparatus—necessary to its operation, yet displaced from its image. At the Royal Saltworks, the geometry of production, labor, and social order was monumentalized as architecture, while the metabolic consequences of that order remained elsewhere. The CAFO makes this relationship visible from above: the ordered fields of confined bodies and the geometric ponds of their accumulated excrement belong to the same plan. Utopia does not eliminate excess; it organizes where excess goes and determines what can remain unseen. The ideal city has not failed to account for shit. The pile of shit has always been part of the ideal city—materially necessary, spatially displaced, and absent from the image through which the city imagines itself.
Fantasies of Closure, or, the Deadly Trails of Fecal Clouds
While the leakage of fecal matter in CAFOs to the water systems, atmospheres, and the surrounding territory is a grave concern of environmental degradation and public health, shit can be captured and transformed into biogas, or in other words, generate capital. Increasingly, manure-management systems that incorporate anaerobic digesters—which capture methane generated through decomposition and convert the gas into heat, electricity, or other forms of energy—are endorsed in the United States by the Environmental Protection Agency as infrastructures of renewable-energy production.9 The technological apparatus surrounding the manure lagoon can therefore produce an image of metabolic closure. Yet while digesters can reduce methane emissions from manure management, they do not make the material remainder disappear; nutrients and digestate still require management.10 As a result, even when contained within the perimeter of an aerial view, fecal byproducts continuously migrate toward adjacent lands, waters, and atmospheres.
Converting methane to biogas as an ecological and financial asset is not new. During the early 1970s, literature on methane generation (natural and nonpolluting power sources) proliferated, and was popularized through journals of alternative technology that architects were avidly reading at the time, including The Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News and Colin Moorcraft’s “Recycling” section in Architectural Design.11 Among the experiments circulating through these publications was the work of Indian scientist Ram Bux Singh, whose research on low-cost methane generators helped popularize the “gobar bio-gas” movement (“gobar” means cow dung in Hindi). Starting in 1960, Singh directed experiments at the Research Station at Ajitmal in Northern India, where he developed more than two hundred low-cost digesters converting plant and animal waste into composted fertilizer and methane for fuel.12 There, Singh invented a chemical method which not only accelerated the fermentation and decomposition in the composting process, but also resulted in the formation of a valuable byproduct: combustible gas.13
Beyond the technical specifications of enabling this profitable conversion of abject matter into a renewable byproduct, converting shit into energy was conceptually and philosophically synced with the rise of a circular ecological ethos during the oil crisis, one that positioned ecology as an artificial circular form of reasoning. Following this logic, living bodies and organic materials were understood as matter in transit, passing from one stage to another and becoming available for reciprocal uses. The death of one thing should accordingly always be subservient to the restitution of another. Continuous regeneration promised a new world that would perpetually recycle materials and feed all leftover substances back into cycles of production. This desire for the absolute purging of waste appears in the opening of Sim Van der Ryn’s The Toilet Papers (1978), where the pioneer of sustainable design articulated the ultimate 1970s eco-social fantasy for a world of no loss, described through the history of reusing organic excretions. Van der Ryn even introduced the book by claiming that the very existence of waste speaks of an incomplete perception of the world. Below the opening paragraph, he cited a quote from 500BC: “A sound man is at salvage, at seeing nothing lost.”14
This holistic fantasy of no loss and no waste remains deeply embedded in ecological design thinking today. Yet closure is not a material condition so much as an idealization produced by circular reasoning. The circle promises that every remainder can become a resource, every output an input, every death the beginning of another productive cycle. But when this logic migrates from the experimental digester to the colossal territories of industrial agriculture, its limits become impossible to ignore. CAFOs cannot contain waste within their enormous territories of lagoons, digesters, pipelines, and spray fields; their management systems merely redistribute it. Closure, in this sense, depends on displacement: what cannot be reincorporated into the productive system must be moved elsewhere, rendered peripheral, renamed as a resource, or made difficult to see. The problem of shit is therefore not simply that there is too much of it, but that the fantasy of closure requires us to believe that it has gone somewhere—that the circle has been completed—when matter has merely changed form and location.
The failure of closure becomes most visible when the circle is redrawn as a trail, a line for moving things away. In 2018, a train carrying approximately ten million pounds of treated human sewage from New York became stranded for two months in Parrish, Alabama, while en route to a landfill nearby. Fifty-six railcars of metropolitan excrement sat under the warming sun, their odor drifting beyond the rail yard toward the town’s softball field, pharmacy, hardware store, homes, and streets.15 The incident exposed a metabolic geography of environmental inequality. While desirable matter—food, commodities, energy—moves toward centers of consumption, undesirable matter—feces, sludge, manure, wastewater—travels in the opposite direction, toward territories where land and disposal are cheaper. Ecological regeneration is thus underwritten by trails of geographic displacement.
At the same time, shit does not travel only as matter that can be weighed, contained, and transported. It also produces an atmosphere. As organic matter decomposes, its material boundaries become unstable: gases, volatile compounds, odors, aerosols, bioaerosols, and particles enter the air and move according to different velocities and trajectories. These “fecal clouds” betray the boundaries we construct around things, troubling the distinction between object and environment, between what remains somewhere and what travels elsewhere. The shit carried by a railcar may appear contained within a vessel moving along a trail, but its atmosphere does not abide by the geometry of its containers. It disperses, dilutes, settles, and is inhaled. The metabolic remainder thus occupies two territories at once: the visible infrastructure through which it is transported and the atmospheric territory whose boundaries are continually redrawn by movement, weather, and breath.
Trails and clouds reveal two dimensions of the same metabolic geography. The question of how shit is retained, piled, decomposed, converted, transported, and redistributed is, therefore, not simply a technical problem of waste management or carbon accounting, but a matter of territorial justice. Shit is evidentiary; it makes visible relations that systems of production separate. It circulates simultaneously through biological and microbial systems, chemical reactions, atmospheric currents, infrastructures, economies, and political jurisdictions. Following shit then means following a chain of uneven exchanges: who produces the waste, who profits from its conversion, who receives the sewage, where biosolids and manure eventually land, who receives carbon credits, and whose bodies are left to inhabit the remainder. The fantasy of closure ends precisely where these trails begin.
The Power of Roaming Sheep
CAFOs concentrate enormous metabolic processes within bounded territories, while urban consumers primarily encounter their outputs.16 The pathology of these colossal territorial infrastructures lies not in their waste streams, but in the spatial regime of enclosure and concentration. A grazing animal, for example, deposits manure intermittently across a territory, where fecal matter can enter soil nutrient cycles and become available to plants, insects, fungi, and microorganisms. The feedlot radically reorganizes this relationship. Thousands of animal bodies are brought together, while the land capable of absorbing their excrement remains elsewhere. What was once dispersed across a landscape accumulates within a bounded field, reshaping the territory and becoming an environmental problem of extraordinary scale. Through concentration, excrement acquires geography. But there are other ways of organizing bodies on the ground.
In Qinghai province, China, in 2015, flocks of sheep were allowed to roam between immense rows of solar panels. The decision, originally taken in agreement with Tiegai Township to address the operational problem of vegetation growing beneath and around the panels, produced an unexpected machine-animal cohabitation that was later described as “livestock-photovoltaic complementarity.”17 The photovoltaic arrays altered shade, evaporation, and soil-moisture conditions, while the grazing sheep maintained vegetation that had become an operational problem for the energy infrastructure.18 The infrastructure itself became entangled with ecological processes it did not entirely control.
The cohabitation of these two systems is fundamentally different from the metabolic imagination of the CAFO. The architecture of confinement attempts to eliminate contingency by stabilizing bodies, climates, feeding schedules, inputs, outputs, and waste streams within an optimized system. Yet with roaming sheep on the solar farm, the animal is not fixed as a productive unit within an enclosure but moves through a heterogeneous field. It eats here and excretes there, trampling vegetation, transporting nutrients, and responding to differences in shade, moisture, plants, and weather. Its metabolism is inseparable from the fertility of the soil and distributed through the flocks’ trajectories. In this sense, roaming is not the opposite of infrastructure. Instead, it suggests that infrastructure may be understood differently: not as a machine that encloses and controls metabolism, but as a framework within which multiple metabolisms encounter one another in different orbits. Rather than reproducing the fantasy of closure, architecture can accommodate incomplete exchanges, unintended consequences, temporal delays, migrations, and leakages.
Learning how to build with metabolism, therefore, requires relinquishing the fantasy of equilibrium. The ecological project has never been to construct closed worlds, but to design the conditions through which bodies, substances, organisms, and environments can remain in exchange without demanding their complete reconciliation. Metabolism produces accumulations and dispersals, piles and clouds, concentrations and migrations. Architecture cannot operate without boundaries, but boundaries need not promise containment. They can instead negotiate what passes through them, what accumulates against them, and what escapes them. The question is not whether architecture leaks, but how, where, and toward whom its leakages are allowed to travel.
Against the ideal city, the feedlot, the manure lagoon, and the fantasy of the closed ecological loop, roaming sheep offer neither another utopia nor a model of nature. Rather, they suggest another planetary imaginary, one in which metabolic exchanges are neither fully contained nor entirely reconciled, but unfold through trajectories, encounters, and uneven distributions of matter. This is not a world without waste, but one in which production and its remainders can no longer be imagined as separate territories.
Anthony Vidler, “Architecture, Poetry, and Everyday Life,” October, no. 187 (2024): 68.
Vidler citing Plato’s Republic, book 2, around 369–73. Anthony Vidler, “How to Invent Utopia: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Plato's Polis,” Lecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, May 17, 2005, ➝.
James M. MacDonald and William D. McBride, The Transformation of U.S. Livestock Agriculture: Scale, Efficiency, and Risks, Economic Information Bulletin no. 43 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, 2009).
“Confined Livestock and Manure Nutrients,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service; see particularly the distinction between recoverable manure nutrients concentrated in confined operations and non-recoverable manure nutrients dispersed over landscapes by grazing animals.
B.L. Harris et al., “Reducing Contamination by Improving Livestock Holding Pen Management,” Texas A&M AgriLife Blackland Research & Extension Center, accessed July 29, 2026, ➝, describing the grading, drainage, settling, runoff collection, and detention-pond systems of open livestock lots.
According to EPA estimates, a 1,000-animal-unit dairy operation produces a manure load comparable to 160,000 people. See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Risk Assessment Evaluation for Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (Washington, DC: U.S. EPA, 2004). Also, according to EPA estimates, large operations move the manure into long-term storage in anaerobic lagoons, tanks, or earthen ponds under anaerobic conditions where the manure releases methane. Depending on location and cropping system, some dairies store the manure for up to a year or longer before field application. See U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Anaerobic Digestion on Dairy Farms (Washington, DC: U.S. EPA, 2021).
JoAnn Burkholder et al., “Impacts of Waste from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations on Water Quality,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 2 (2007): 308–12.
Dick Heederik et al., “Health Effects of Airborne Exposures from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations,” Environmental Health Perspectives 115, no. 2 (2007): 298–302.
“Environmental Benefits of Anaerobic Digestion (AD),” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, updated April 17, 2026. See also “Crop and Livestock Practices - Manure Management,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, updated July 14, 2025. USDA explains that anaerobic digesters use manure to produce biogas that can generate electricity and can reduce greenhouse-gas emissions associated with manure storage and handling.
“NRCS Climate-Smart Mitigation Activities,” U.S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service. NRCS describes anaerobic digestion as decomposition of manure in the absence of oxygen, producing methane that can be captured for combustion; it also identifies benefits including methane reduction, odor management, pathogen reduction, and energy production.
See Ram Bux Singh, Generating Methane from Organic Wastes (research paper, Gobar Gas Station in Ajitmal, Etawah, India, 1973). See also “How to Generate Electric power from Garbage,” Mother Earth News, no.3, 1967; S.A Klein, “Anaerobic Digestion of Solid Wastes” Compost Science: Journal of Waste Recycling, January–February 1972; “Interview with Ram Bux Singh,” Mother Earth News, no.18, 1973; M.A Indiani and C.M Acharye, Biogas Plants: Their installation, Operation, Maintenance and Use (New Delhi: Indian Council of Agricultural Research, 1963; Alvaro Ortega, The ECOL Operation: Ecology, Building and Common Sense (Montreal: School of Architecture, McGill University, 1972); “Gobar Gas. Methane Experiments in India” Mother Earth News, no.12, 1969.
Ram Bux Singh, interview, Mother Earth News, no.18, 1973. See also Alexander Kira, The Bathroom (Ithaca: Center for Housing and Environmental Studies, Cornell University, 1966).
Singh, Generating Methane from Organic Wastes, 2.
In his book introduction Van der Ryn writes: “Throughout this book you will find the word ‘waste’ used to refer to those materials—feces and urine—your body passes on to make energy available to some other form of life. This is what you give back to the earth. The idea of waste, of something unusable reveals an incomplete understanding of how things work. Nature admits no waste. Nothing is leftover; everything is joined in the spiral of life. Perhaps other cultures know this better than we, for they have no concept of, no word for waste.” See Sim Van der Ryn, The Toilet Papers: Recycling Waste and Conserving Water (Sausalito, CA: Ecological Design Press, 1978).
Erin Shaw Street, “A Poop Train from New York Befouled a Small Alabama Town, Until the Town Fought Back,” The Washington Post, April 20, 2018.
See Neil Brenner and Nikos Katsikis, “Operational Landscapes: Hinterlands of the Capitalocene,” Architectural Design 90, no. 1 (2020): 28.
“‘Photovoltaic Sheep’ Increase Herders’ Incomes,” National Development and Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China, June 27, 2022.
Shuyuan Zheng et al., “Temporal Dynamics of PVPP Ecological Restoration Benefits and Their Response to Grazing Pressure Shifts: A UAV and Plot Survey-Based Quantitative Assessment,” Renewable Energy 269 (2026): art. 125851; Shengjuan Yue et al., “Large-Scale Photovoltaic Farms in the Qinghai Desert: Soil Quality Assessment Methods,” Environmental Engineering Science 41, no. 6 (2024): 251–59.
