Does New Urbanism “Just Show Up”? Deliberate Process and the Evolving Plan for Markham Centre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces three decades of planning for a Canadian suburban downtown in Markham, Ontario, an early adopter of new urbanism. While leading new urbanist design firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (also known as DPZ) produced site plans for both Cornell and Markham Centre, much of the research attention on the implementation of new urbanism has focused on the Cornell development, where build-out began in the 1990s. Construction was delayed in Markham Centre until a decade later and continues today. The article is empirically grounded in a discourse analysis of policy, housing advertisements, and interviews with key actors in the planning and development process. New urbanism’s popular influence has led Fulton (2017) to argue that a ubiquitous urbanism now “just shows up.” Mainstreaming of new urbanist principles and the discursive framing of planning for Markham Centre as an ‘evolution’ further underscores this perception. Key actors describe an ‘organic’ planning process illustrating how the plan has changed in response to shifting market dynamics, political interests, and funding opportunities. The article explores the discourse about new urbanism and argues that in Markham Centre new urbanism has not just shown up, but has rather required a deliberate, collaborative, and adaptable process. Development that is transit oriented and attractive to knowledge economy workers underpins the contemporary vision. New urbanism as a label is losing relevance in Markham, where sprawl represents the past, new urbanism describes the legacy of 1990s planning, and a ‘real’ competitive urbanism is the vision for the future.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| 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".