The Canadian Urban System,1971-2001: Responses to a Changing World
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada is now overwhelmingly an urban nation. More than 80% of Canadians now live in urban areas and over 60% in the larger metropolitan regions. As those cities change, so too does the nation. In recent decades, Canadian cities and the entire urban system have .undergone a substantial transformation, not least because the context - national and international - in which Canadian cities have developed has changed. As the factors driving change have evolved, so must our ideas evolve about how the urban system is organized. Drawing on an extensive body of research on urban Canada over the last thirty years, much of it undertaken through the Centre for Urban and Community Studies, this paper provides an overview of change in the Canadian urban system for the period from 1971 to 2001. lt begins with a critical review of the earty ideas that guided that research and offers a revised and more comprehensive conceptual framework. Particular attention is paid to the importance of changes in the national environment- in the economy, the demography, and the public sector- and to shifts in the global environment that have in combination reshaped the urban system. The empirical analysis then demonstrates how that system has responded. Each change in the external environment produces a different pattern of linkages within the urban system and with cities outside the country, and thus a new geography of urban growth and change. The paper concludes with a review of current forecasts of anticipated urban growth to 2026 and speculates on the future evolution of the urban system within a rapidly changing continental and global environment. That system will certainly continue to evolve, but often in unpredictable ways. Growth is likely to become more uneven, with further concentration in a few large metropolitan regions and with much of the rest of the country in relative decline. The direction of evolution of the urban system is likely to become more dependent on forces emanating from outside the country.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".