RIVER+CITY+LIFE: A Guide to Renewing Toronto's Lower Don Lands by Stoss Landscape Urbanism [EDRA/Places Awards 2008 -- Planning] - eScholarship
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RIVER+CITY+LIFE: A Guide to Renewing Toronto’s Lower Don Lands Stoss Landscape Urbanism Cities have been rediscovering their waterfronts for several decades, using reinvestment to proclaim their heritage and to redefine their civic identity. These changes can be traced to changing urban geography, as new modes of transportation, deindustrialization, and new economies of scale have led formerly important industries to move away from the urban core. At the same time, vacant inner-city sites and a shrink- ing tax base have challenged municipalities to develop new income-generating strategies. Their solution has frequently been to rebrand older urban districts as destina- tions for tourists, entrepreneurs, or affluent new residents. River walks, museum parks, and civic centers have been used as catalysts in the effort to bring new cultural and civic institutions to the urban core. Above: The Stoss LU plan called for a renaturalization of the mouth of the Don River, creating a braided series of river channels that would allow changing patterns of flow and create a series of new residential areas. Opposite: The plan called for creation of an island park between the dual spans of an emblematic new “spider” bridge, a signature piece of sculptural infrastructure at the river’s mouth. Spearheading these changes have been attempts to clean up degraded urban environments and reframe them as urban amenities. Livable urban space is now conceived as attractive natural spaces and new public facilities to enjoy them. It is here that this Planning Award winner presents a subtle shift in the discipline of urban design. It marks the arrival of a new technique of place-making: natural ecologies of place. RIVER+CITY+LIFE was one of four invited entries in the second phase of an urban design competition for Toronto’s Lower Don Lands. It was not the winning entry; that honor went to a team led by Michael Van Valk- enburgh Associates, whose proposals were deemed more “cost effective and achievable.” Nevertheless, the EDRA/ Places jury felt the work by this team, led by Boston’s Stoss Landscape Urbanism, presented a stunning vision of the integration of urban form and natural process. This competition and several others like it in recent years have made it evident that Toronto is now second only to New York in North America in urban design ini- tiatives. Current policies emphasize high environmental standards, strong design review, and a focus on the public realm. Toronto is fast becoming a laboratory for this new focus on urban ecologies. Stoss Landscape Urbanism / RIVER+CITY+LIFE
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.218 | 0.080 |
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".