Hans Blumenfeld: a moderate defence of expertise in the controversial 1960s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite an impressive international career, the German city planner Hans Blumenfeld remains largely unknown. In The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, Christopher Klemek depicts him as an apologist of authoritarian and technocratic urban renewal. This statement is puzzling because many post-war planners saw him as a humble left-wing progressive. Drawing from a close analysis of the writings and actions of Blumenfeld, in particular his work in Canada, this article shows that he was far from being an uncritical apologist of urban renewal in North America. He was always very sceptical but, as opposed to Jane Jacobs, he did not think that modernist urban planning had it all wrong. He always thought that progress came not only from citizens’ participation, but also principally from science and expertise. For that reason, Blumenfeld tried, on the one hand, to transform the language of city planning to answer criticism from citizens and activists, and, on the other, to retain the expertise to proceed from plan-making to a communication-process, as some professionals were beginning to advocate at the time.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".