Urban Geography in Transition: A Canadian Perspective on the 1980s and Beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The history of most academic disciplines reveals distinct periods of research activity characterized by competing intellectual paradigms, varying student interest and volatile public awareness. This paper asks whether the 1980s was one of those periods for Canadian urban geography. One perspective views the 1980s as a rather dry valley of declining interest, productivity and relevance. In effect, the decade served as a transition period from the vibrancy of urban research in the 1960s and 1970s to the pluralism and renewed urban interest of the 1990s. To test these propositions five indices were developed to measure levels of activity and output in Canadian urban geography and related fields, from the 1960s to the present: government funding, the number and composition of academic journals, government publications, and membership in academic and professional organizations. The results are mixed, but revealing. There is no clear valley of decline in the 1980s, no single trajectory in the evolution of urban geography, and no apparent resurgence of interest or activity during the 1990s. Instead, research activity in the sub-field appears to have declined, to have become more fragmented and dispersed, and to have been subjected to the effects of increased privatization and professionalism. The concluding section explores the reasons for this experience, and emphasizes the fundamental importance of context and timing—changing national social conditions, the political climate and the growth of the urban system under study—in shaping the urban agenda generally and Canadian urban geography in particular.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.016 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".