On the growth dynamics of cities and regions - seven lessons. A Canadian perspective with thoughts on regional Australia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Seven trends/lessons in regional development are reviewed, taking Canada as reference point: 1) the forces of agglomeration will not lessen; 2) top cities will remain so; 3) distance continues to matter; 4) costs matter, a driver of non-metropolitan growth; 5) market access increasingly matters; 6) as do naturally amenities (sea and trees), but constrained by distance; 7) natural resources are a double-edged sword, both a driver of growth and possible impediment. For regional Australia, as for peripheral Canada, the chief discriminant factor is lesson 3 (distance). The transport costs for goods and information have fallen. But, relative distances have not changed. The cost of transporting people - prime input into knowledge-intensive production - has not fallen, and has arguably risen as the opportunity cost of time rises. The essential distinction is not between metropolitan and non-metropolitan areas, but between those that are close and those that are far.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".