A ‘Bedford Falls’ kind of place: Neighbourhood branding and commercial revitalisation in processes of gentrification in Toronto, Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on in-depth stakeholder interviews and media accounts, we explore a case of civic activism over the opening of a strip club in a neighbourhood of Etobicoke, one of six municipalities amalgamated in 1998 to form the current City of Toronto, Ontario. In 2008, the growing residential gentrification of the area had not yet extended into the commercial district and the opening of the strip club challenged the gentrifiers’ nascent ‘revitalising and family-friendly’ neighbourhood brand – a brand that became integral to their civic and legal strategies to impede the opening of the club. This case highlights the ways in which gentrifiers participate in processes of commercial gentrification by enacting place marketing strategies that express social and spatial class-based disaffiliation and that define suitable uses of neighbourhood public spaces. The political contestation of neighbourhood boundaries takes shifting civic and legal forms, and the place branding expressed and promoted by these strategies encourages commercial gentrification by inviting particular patterns of class-based consumption into neighbourhood business districts. The case also underscores the contingent meaning of neighbourhood land uses for gentrifiers and the growing potential importance of commercial identities for gentrifiers’ relational constructions of ‘community’ and its boundaries. We contextualise this case within literature on commercial gentrification and the constitution of identity – individual, neighbourhood and class – through processes of ‘othering’, demonstrating that gentrification is a politically contested social and spatial practice with affective and material consequences.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".