Suspend the bridge : community power, regime theory and the decision to build Vancouver’s Lions’ Gate Bridge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, regime theorists have begun to examine the question of community power in cities and to address criticisms made against the older elite and pluralist schools of interpretation. Regime theory argues that political power is neither centered in the hands of an elite as suggested by the elite theorists, nor equally distributed among all members of the city as argued by pluralists. On the contrary, regime theory contends that an informal coalition forms between government and private interests to develop and implement urban policy initiatives. Despite regime theory's contribution to the community power debate, it still requires refinement. The interwar decision to build Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge provides an excellent opportunity to test and refine regime theory analysis. The bridge decision demonstrates that while the pro-development coalition sought alliances and support from typical regime members such as local government and community organizations, opposition from elements within the business community, who were tied to Canada's natural resource sector, arose against the urban initiative. During both the 1926-27 and 1930s attempts to build the bridge, opponents looked to the federal government for support. The opposition succeeded in convincing the federal Department of Public Works to reject the bridge proposal in 1926-27 and Prime Minister Bennett's Conservative government to do the same in 1934. As a result of the opponents' actions, the bridge coalition had to seek compensatory support from the federal Liberal party once it formed the national government in 1935. The larger significance of this case study of urban decision making is that regime theory needs to take into account the national context in regime formation. Scholars employing a regime theory approach to community power should not assume a coherent and united business sector in cities such as Vancouver, and must account for the role of opposition in moulding a successful coalition.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.029 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
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".