The Ballet of the Streets: Teaching about Cities at Street Level
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The urban scholar Jane Jacobs once described city life as “the ballet of the streets.” In more than a quarter-century of joint teaching, we have used Jacobs’ metaphor to help our students understand that cities are living organisms created and maintained, for good or ill, by the people who live and work in them. At the heart, our teaching are intense encounters with cities, a “street-level” experience designed not only to give students a chance to walk the city’s streets (especially streets lying far off the beaten path), but to meet its people, prominent and not, so that they can discover for themselves, in living context, the city’s culture, varying life-styles, and issues. Once they learn that cities are people, our longer-term hope is that they will become active in the cities and urban regions which almost assuredly lie in their futures. Given their international importance and astronomical growth over the last half-century, it is arguable that cities are the most significant social systems in the world and, as a result, are crucial for students to understand as cities. The purpose of this paper is to share, first, the methodology we have developed for studying cities “at street level”; and second, to suggest how that methodology might be used in the study of cities anywhere. Starting with a course comparing New York and Toronto, we have used a similar approach to study cities in England, Ireland, Italy, Central Europe, China, and Vietnam.
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.
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 | 0.004 | 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 | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| 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 it