Livable City/Unequal City: The Politics of Policy-Making in a « Creative » Boomtown
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a tendency in contemporary North American urban policy-making to uncritically connect specific ideals of urban ‘livability’ with efforts to cater to the whims of the so-called ‘Creative Class.’ The paper engages with this tendency through an analysis of the politics of urban policy-making in Austin, Texas – a place regarded as an exemplar of ‘livability’ and ‘creativity.’ With reference to the Austin case, the paper identifies and describes two related spatial frames that underpin the ‘Creative Class’ thesis and its relationship to a certain conception of urban livability – an idealization of the vibrant urban neighbourhood and a moral geography of competing ‘livable’ and ‘creative’ cities. The paper then addresses the question of inequality and its relationship to policies aimed at nurturing, attracting, and retaining the ‘Creative Class.’ This is done through a discussion of Austin’s experience of rising economic inequality and declining housing affordability just as the city became ‘creative’ and ‘livable.’ The paper’s core argument is that policy-makers must acknowledge and address the inequality that seems to result from the implementation of narrow ‘livability’ and ‘creativity’ policies and that advocates of the ‘Creative Class’ thesis must address, with more than hand-wringing and platitudes, evidence that ‘creative cities’ are becoming increasingly less livable for most people.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".