A Machine for Governing: Technical Standardization, Mass Housing Provision, and the State in Mid-Twentieth-Century Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis retraces the historical emergence of housing policy in Canada through a specific technology of power: national building regulations.This thesis argues that national building regulations were formative to the federal state's emergent claims upon the improvement of residential development during the mid-twentieth-century.Drawing upon and developing François Ewald's concept of the "technical norm," this thesis uses the case of national building regulations to examine how the federal state became a discursive and material site where mass housing development was governed.In seeking to benefit from standardization, various bureaucrats and industrial actors claimed, negotiated, worked around, and maintained the ostensible 'objectivity' of state regulation that national building standards could variably offer them.In this process, national building regulations were used to translate complex housing issues, work processes, and class inequalities into a seemingly technical "problem" of state management.This project probably hasn't convinced a number of family members, friends, and colleagues that Canadian history isn't boring.The history of Canadian building standards is at times a dull topic.Nonetheless, I am very fortunate to be surrounded by people who have actively supported me in researching and writing this thesis.First and foremost, I thank my supervisor, Dr. Pablo Mendez, for bringing incredible dedication, clarity, intellectual rigor, and enthusiasm to this project.Your supervision and
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".