`Let the Streets Take Care of Themselves': Making Sociological and Common Sense of `Skid Row'
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay develops a conceptualisation of skid row as a cultural and historical space for the containment of moral and material dereliction. First, the social scientific literature is reviewed, revealing the historical shift by which skid row became understood as a site for the containment of moral decay. Then, a Weberian `ideal type' is constructed to account for the use of skid row as an analytical concept. This ideal type is contrasted with two other prevalent patterns of urban displacement and effacement: the slum and ghetto. The conception is further tested through a consideration of two ethnographic studies of skid row districts, focusing on the everyday perceptions and experiences of community stakeholders. It is concluded that the range of cultural strategies of naming engaged in, support the retention of this contested term as a way of rendering the analytical aims of social scientists accountable to the commonsense understandings of community stakeholders.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".