An exploration of the role of planners in supporting local access to grocery stores
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the role of planners in supporting local access to grocery stores in Canadian cities. Grocery stores are an important neighbourhood feature- they not only provide access to nutritional food, they also contribute to neighbourhood vitality, acting as a hub for local economic activity and community life. In recent years, evidence has emerged that, as a result of grocery industry trends towards larger formats, access to grocery stores has diminished in areas of cities in North America and the United Kingdom. Planners have a role in ensuring that basic services—such as housing and water— are adequately provided. This thesis argues that grocery stores, as a basic service that contributes to individual and community health, warrant planning attention. However, grocery store access has not received systematic attention by the planning profession. There is little literature on the role that planners play in supporting grocery access. This thesis explores the opportunities and constraints facing planners in supporting local access to grocery stores. It is based on a review of relevant literature and on case studies of planning attention to grocery stores in Edmonton, Alberta and Vancouver, British Columbia. The research reveals that planners in these two cities recognize the importance of grocery stores and in some cases have undertaken efforts to improve grocery access. Typically, these efforts aim to address neighbourhood vitality rather than food access. The Vancouver and Edmonton experiences reveal the influence of political context on planner involvement in grocery access. They also indicate that planners play a key role in promoting an accessible built environment and illustrate that planners are wellpositioned to engage in community dialogue on grocery access needs; there is an opportunity to raise the profile of food access in discussions focused on neighbourhood vitality. This thesis concludes that there is a need to increase the connections between social planning and land use planning. Planners can play an important role in drawing attention to grocery access within various planning processes.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".