The "Wide Area VISTA Extra-galactic Survey" (WAVES) is a 4MOST Consortium Design Reference Survey which will use the VISTA/4MOST facility to spectroscopically survey ~2million galaxies to \(r_{\rm AB} < 22\) mag. WAVES consists of two interlocking galaxy surveys ("WAVES-Deep" and "WAVES-Wide"), providing the next two steps beyond the highly successful 1M galaxy Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 250k Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey. WAVES will enable an unprecedented study of the distribution and evolution of mass, energy, and structures extending from 1-kpc dwarf galaxies in the local void to the morphologies of 200-Mpc filaments at \(z\sim1\). A key aim of both surveys will be to compare comprehensive empirical observations of the spatial properties of galaxies, groups, and filaments, against state-of-the-art numerical simulations to distinguish between various Dark Matter models.