Toronto’s Tent Encampments: Excavating Northwestern Informalities and State Ambiguities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Major Paper examines the ambiguities of municipal state regulation in relation to the dwelling practices of Toronto’s unhoused and the difficulties navigating urban space by marginalized publics in the context of two overlapping crises: an affordable housing crisis and a public health emergency. This paper argues tent encampments are a persistent mode of urban informality in the global northwest, where tents and other small structures provide a source of housing when faced with limited access and affordability. Throughout the pandemic, tent encampments proliferated across the City of Toronto, an increase linked to the heightened risk of COVID-19 transmission within congregate emergency shelters. However, tent encampments are not a novel occurrence and typically occupy the ‘interstitial' spaces of the city. Using the case study of Toronto, the analysis investigates how urban informality is (co)produced and (co)mediated in and through the state and civil society. The findings suggest the local state—at times ambiguous and negotiated relative to an array of civil society actors, property relations, and desirable formalities—routinely enforces encampment clearances on public property and influences encampment demolitions on private property. The paper explores alternative conceptualizations of tent encampments before proposing an urbanism of empathy aimed at centring those at the forefront of the discussion: unhoused people experiencing homelessness in Toronto.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".