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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.

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.

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 flows). They find that jurisdiction is used as a flexible 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.

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).

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consensus decision making serves as a foundation for organizing an alternative economy while the agency of the economic project itself organizes participants because it serves to distribute resources as people need them and foment a community of sharing based on the concept that as individuals we are lacking but as a community we have enough. The paper asserts that as activists looking to foment change, alternative economic projects in themselves are actors in organizing community building and resistance to capitalism.

El Cambalache (The Swap in English), located in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, is an exchange-based money-less economy that trades unwanted items as well as knowledge, abilities and skills that one wants to share. The project receives anything; specifically used, broken and/or unwanted electronics as well as just about anything else that one might possess. In exchange people provide laptop maintenance classes, language exchange, land to be worked, rooms, gardening services, objects, stories, etc. The rules in this money-less non-capitalist economy organize participation through one exchange or many.

Consensus decision making is an effective method for engaging in non-hierarchical research projects.

This project contributes to research in heterodox economies by presenting an original project with a new suggestion for exchange value as an inclusive process of exchange among participants in the economy. It also provides evidence that consensus decision making can be a useful and productive method for research.