Resisting the World-Class City: Community Opposition and the Politics of a Local Arena Development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the public subsidy of major league sport franchises and associated urban development projects remains wildly popular in some constituencies, these expenditures have, increasingly, been met with organized resistance. This article examines the formation of Voices for Democracy (VFD)—a grassroots community group that opposed the use of public funds to build a CAD $606.5 million arena and entertainment district in Edmonton, Alberta. I begin by providing an analysis of VFD’s division of labor and the collective development of the group’s political claims and tactical repertoire to challenge a powerful growth coalition between 2011–2013. Next, I examine the unfavorable political opportunity structure that set decisive limits on what the group could challenge. The article concludes with a discussion of why VFD was unable to cultivate a more widespread coalition of support and, in turn, how the ‘boosterish’ coalition in Edmonton—a coalition that included the Edmonton Oilers, the downtown business community, the mayor and a majority of council, and senior civil servants—were able to contain opposition over the course of this divisive debate.
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 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 | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".