Meaning, Media and Dwellings: The Public Image of the High-rise Toronto Condo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines representations of condominiums in the real estate section of the Toronto Star from 1967 through 1997, and in the Star’s Condo Living section between 1997 and 2007. I depart from conventional approaches by evaluating the articles as well as the advertisements that comprise the real estate section, based on the assumption that the context in which these texts appear is significant: a major newspaper is not a neutral vehicle, and ads and articles—consumed together, as they are in a print newspaper—will interact in creating representations of condominiums. \nThe Condo Living section in particular is seen to perform a number of brand-like activities, most obviously in positioning the Toronto high-rise condominium as a dwelling that is particularly well-suited to young, middle-class women. This occurs partly as a function of the frequency with which women are portrayed as condominium owners. Beyond this, however, I show how the advertisements and articles in Condo Living help remake the public image of the condominium by countering existing stigmas attached to high-rise living. The section also helps to differentiate the condominium from other dwelling types by emphasizing elaborate amenities and making claims to urbanity through high-profile cultural and entertainment events. \nPerhaps most importantly, I demonstrate how the leading present-day design aesthetic—a reworking of midcentury modernisms—came to thoroughly dominate the image and the built form of the recent-era condominium. Positioning the condominium as a design-led dwelling type had profound implications: due to the links between design and high-end fashion, health and beauty items, the condominium immediately became a member of an aspirational product category associated with women, wealth, style and glamour. In addition to positioning the condominium as ‘naturally’ suited to young single, women, it removed the condo from direct competition with the single-family house, allowing it to be perceived as a desirable and distinct—rather than denigrated—dwelling type.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".