Making a Music City: The Commodification of Culture in Toronto’s Urban Redevelopment, Tensions between Use-Value and Exchange-Value, and the Counterproductive Treatment of Alternative Cultures within Municipal Legal Frameworks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A survey of some of Toronto’s culture-based strategies for rejuvenation and redevelopment reveal a problematic focus placed on exchange-value over use-value and community cultural wealth. Two particular effects have been noted and will be explored in the following pages: (1) the displacement of certain kinds of venues and their original attendees to the detriment of preserving urban intangible cultural heritage and high use-value generated in particular spaces of community cultural wealth by cultural and subcultural groups in order to better harness the exchange-value of a place through either the commodification of the existing space, which renders it less accessible to previous attendees, or through a replacement of the existing space with a venue better designed for profit maximization; and (2) the disjunctive nature of creative city planning initiatives and frameworks in the context of other municipal policy and planning documents that can ultimately deploy conflicting strategies, by-laws, policies, and so on, that block or snuff out the very cultural initiatives desired — or, as nightlife and nighttime culture scholars have suggested, simultaneously deregulate and re-regulate these subversive initiatives and transgressive spaces. This paper will undertake a discussion of the role that the commodification of culture, as a generator of exchange-value, plays in this context, especially in relation to the disjunctive and unequal results that occur on the ground as a result of creative city and culture-led regeneration legislation, policies, and strategies, and why this matters. It will look at the commodification of culture and the reification of “authenticity” in relation to spaces of community cultural wealth and intangible cultural heritage where, even if these spaces carry a high use-value for those who have generated culture within a space, this use-value may be trumped by the exchange-value that tempts developers to capitalize on the space.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".