Urban sustainability and counter-sustainability: Spatial contradictions and conflicts in policy and governance in the Freiburg and Calgary metropolitan regions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on empirical research carried out in the metropolitan regions of Freiburg, Germany, and Calgary, Canada, we reposition the sustainability policies of municipalities within a wider regional and relational framework. This perspective reveals significant epistemological blind spots in the localist and non-relational ontologies that undergird much of the urban sustainability discourse. While the city of Freiburg has garnered world-wide attention for its multi-faceted initiatives and achievements in sustainable urban development, these initiatives have yet to be coherently addressed in the wider Freiburg metropolitan region, leading to a variety of policies and practices in the hinterland that run counter to Freiburg’s ‘green city’ objectives. In a parallel fashion, the city of Calgary incorporated significant sustainability principles in its 2009 Master Development Plan and Transportation Plan –‘Plan-It’– yet such principles have not been taken up on a regional scale. Despite substantial differences in size and developmental history, both cities exhibit a profound disconnection from their regional contexts with regard to sustainable development policies and politics. In both metropolitan regions, conventional growth politics are still paramount. A significant conflict emerges between ‘sustainable’ central cities seeking a ‘sustainability fix’ to their fiscal, environmental and quality of life problems, and more remote jurisdictions seeking to attract investment through low tax regimes and limited development regulation – what we label a ‘counter-sustainability fix’. These contrasting and dialectically related policies have substantial consequences for the social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, calling into question policies that promote ‘sustainability in one place’.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".