Planning as Property: Uncovering the Hidden Racial Logic of a Municipal Nuisance By-law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her landmark essay, Whiteness as Property, Cheryl Harris powerfully demonstrates how racial identity and property claims are co-produced in law. Through a genealogy of law starting with American slave law, Harris reveals how whiteness has evolved from a form of racial identity into a legally acknowledged and protected form of property. In this article I apply Harris’ framework to an analysis of two by-laws passed by the City of Brantford (Ontario) in 2008, in order to reveal a hidden racial logic within the statutory powers vested in municipalities. By analyzing these by-laws, as well as the litigation which followed, I demonstrate how the regulatory and enforcement powers of municipal planning processes can authorize settler colonial claims to property, while at the same time conferring upon municipalities the power to criminalize Indigenous assertions of territorial authority. Ultimately, the planning powers vested in municipalities are shown to play an important role in affirming the sovereignty claims of the settler state, while diminishing the sovereignty claims of Indigenous peoples.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".