Legal orderings of waste in built spaces

• Author: Kate Parizeau, Josh Lepawsky
• Position: Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada.; Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, Canada.
• Pages: 21-38

Legal orderings of waste in

built spaces

Kate Parizeau

Department of Geography, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada, and

Josh Lepawsky

Department of Geography, Memorial University of Newfoundland,

St. John’s, Canada

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate by what means and to what ends waste, its materiality and

its symbolic meanings are legally regulated in built environments.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors investigate the entanglement of law and the built

environment through an analysis of waste-related legal case studies in the Canadian context. They

investigate a notable Supreme Court case and three examples of Canadian cities’ by-laws and municipal

regulations (particularly regarding informal recycling practices). They mobilize what Valverde calls the

work of jurisdiction in their analysis.

Findings – The authors argue that the regulation of waste and wasting behaviours is meant to

discipline relationships between citizens and governments in the built environment (e.g. mitigating

nuisance, facilitating service provision and public health, making individuals more visible and legible

in the eyes of the law and controlling and capturing material ows). They nd that jurisdiction is used

as a exible and malleable legal medium in the interactions between law and the built environment.

Thus, the material treatment of waste may invoke notions of constraint, freedom, citizenship,

governance and cognate concepts and practices as they are performed in and through built

environments. Waste storage containers appear to operate as black holes in that they evacuate property

rights from the spaces that waste regularly occupies.

Originality/value – There is scant scholarly attention paid to legal orderings of waste in built

environments. This analysis reveals the particular ways that legal interventions serve to construct

notions of the public good and the public sphere through orderings of waste (an inherently

indeterminate object).

Keywords Waste, Informal recycling, Jurisdiction, Legal geography, Property relations,

Public good

Paper type Research paper

Introduction: the indeterminacy of waste

Waste is a material and semiotic thing. It presents diverse affordances and risks,

ranging from the mundane daily tasks of tidying up household grime to entombing

spent nuclear fuel for millennia (Krupar, 2013), and it meaningfully represents our past

selves, our relationship with the state and the mutable boundary between individual

consumption and collective responsibilities for environmental management. Waste is, to

Support for this work was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of

Canada, who provided research funding, but no input on study design or analysis. Invaluable

research assistance was provided by Kiera Hoekstra.

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/1756-1450.htm

Legal

orderings of

waste

21

Received 24 January 2014

Revised 4 July 2014

5 October 2014

15 October 2014

Accepted 17 October 2014

InternationalJournal of Law in the

BuiltEnvironment

Vol.7 No. 1, 2015

pp.21-38

©Emerald Group Publishing Limited

1756-1450

DOI 10.1108/IJLBE-01-2014-0005

use Moore’s term, a parallax object: something that interrupts the “smooth running of

things” (Moore, 2012, p. 781, citing Zizek). In the following analysis, our concern is

principally with the interpretation of waste and acts of wasting in disputatious legal

scenarios, especially ones in which waste storage devices such as bins and bags are of

key importance. Such scenarios, we claim, illuminate important relationships between

waste, wasting, the performance of law and the built environment. The odd character of

these relationships demonstrates how waste is a medium for legal relationships, and its

management is a reection of shared social values.

Using close readings of Canadian court cases and municipal by-laws in select cities,

we argue that an analysis of the legal treatment and regulation of waste and wasting can

provide an insight into on-going social constructions of:

• the public good;

• the public sphere; and

• jurisdiction (usually understood as the spatially bound authority of the law).

Therefore, waste can be understood as a central element in “[…] the continuous

interplay of presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, concreteness and

abstraction that delineate the topology of law and the city” (FitzGerald and

Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2008, p. 435).

Cultural factors support the strangely absent-presence of waste in our lives,

including the predominance of a consumeristic “throwaway society” (Evans, 2012),

resistance to such practices through careful ridding (Gregson et al., 2007a and b) and the

pervasive “out of sight, out of mind” attitude towards waste (de Coverly et al., 2008) that

are common in the North American society. Such framings are not universal, and

myriad other geographies of waste and wasting have also been observed (Lepawsky

and Mather, 2011;Drackner, 2005;Gille, 2007).

Waste is therefore a relational concept: it is a collection of items that are no longer

seen to hold value or use for the disposing individual in their particular social context.

Because of the indeterminacy of these characterizations, different actors can

simultaneously view “waste” items differently. For example, informal recyclers and

freegans (ideologically motivated people who subsist on the cast-offs of consumer

society) routinely reclaim items for reuse or resale from waste streams, such as

recyclable materials that are eligible for deposit refunds, used clothing, repairable

electronics and household goods and food (in some cases). That these potentially usable/

salable goods were initially placed in the trash stream is an indicator of divergent

perceptions of value for a given item.

The uncertain nature of waste is apparent in the multiple positions it holds in the

urban sphere in any given moment: it is a negative good whose removal costs money,

and whose absence is economically valued (Thompson, 1998); it is a potential economic

resource, and thereby subject to contestable property rights; and it is a source of

symbolic meaning (as an indicator of anti-social behaviour, as a material linkage

between citizen and service provider, etc.). In this way, it can be said that waste has

liminal status in society (Gille, 2007): it is both valued and worthless, legitimate yet

unrecognized, absent and present.

Consistent with its liminal status, waste is placed at the physical and social

borderlands of our communities. It is placed out of sight within hidden spaces and

IJLBE

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