This thesis questions the boundaries that define waste as a public or private dilemma, investigating these boundaries as productive sites for the imagination of social life. Learning from methods of processing, conveyance and disposal, I investigate a number of possible sites where the architectural mediates the life of a wasted object and the social life that is produced around an engagement with that object. Waste has largely been disappeared from the city and the senses by mechanisms of modern sanitation and architecture, moved to the urban periphery and concealed inside increasingly refined membranes of storage and movement. Though ruptures or discrepancies in the waste stream are often read as signposts of failure of a certain project of the modern city, I read these ruptures or excesses as productive irritants for working and reworking how we conceptualize public space. It is within the friction of overlapping claims made to an issue such as waste that public life emerges.