Reflections on Calgary’s Spatial Structure: An Urban Economist’s Critique of Municipal Planning in Calgary
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Affordable housing and a manageable commute are central to the well-being of Calgarians. Yet among larger Canadian metropolitan areas today, Calgary already has close to the most expensive housing, and the average journey-to-work time, close to 30 minutes, is as high today as it was in Los Angeles in 2000, when Los Angeles had a population 10 times larger. Decisions around how Calgary grows are based on the policies within The City’s Municipal Development Plan and the Calgary Transportation Plan, which together provide a blueprint for Calgary’s spatial development and transportation system. These plans— and therefore, their assumptions about future effects on congestion and rents — are based around a population forecast that does not reflect the historical growth pattern of the city and legitimizes spatial containment. The shortcomings in these plans, both adopted in 2009, are likely to result in longer commuting times and even more expensive real estate prices. These will be well beyond what The City has prepared citizens to expect and accept, as planners plow ahead with proposals to further entrench the downtown as the dominant employment centre. Calgarians need to be levelled with about the realities that come with pursuing a plan that calls for spatial containment and intensification centred on a single, dominant central business district. The plans present a vision of the “Good Urban Life,” and propose to enforce it through a particular choice of transportation system, through land-use regulation, and through a downtown parking freeze, with little regard to economics. The cost of this vision will in turn discourage new firms and new people from moving to Calgary. Calgarians should be informed about future transportation costs – for mass transit and automobiles – in congestion, time, and funding. And they must be informed about the effects this will all have on the cost of property for families and businesses. Only then can citizens properly consider their options and choose their city’s future. Without that Calgarians may find their quality of life diminished in ways they were never prepared to expect.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| 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".