Towers <i>Once</i> in the Park: Uprooting Toronto's Welfare Landscapes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue ‘Revisiting the green geographies of welfare planning’, edited by Johan Pries and Mattias Qviström.ABSTRACT In the midst of the growing ecological crisis, the ‘compact city’ has become the mainstream urban paradigm for the sustainable future of western cities. However, the uneven implementation of densification policies can have adverse impacts on the amount and quality of urban green spaces, which are vital resources for local communities. This paper explores the controversies of introducing compactness in the case of Toronto’s ‘towers in the park’: housing estates built in comprehensively planned neighbourhoods from the 1950s through the 1970s. It does so through the lenses of urban design and landscape planning, by tracking the evolution of narratives that underpin the current urban regime, and by assessing their legitimacy from the perspective of residents. The findings highlight a persistent mismatch between Toronto’s dominant urban design paradigm and the sociomaterial context of its uncritical application. Exemplar episodes of tower infill show two discursive tropes to justify compactness: the alleged underuse of open spaces, and the creation of a proper public realm by replacing these spaces with buildings and streets. Beyond uncovering the fallacy of both claims, this paper outlines an alternative perspective for more equitable strategies for common green spaces, outside unconditional protection and zealous quest for “value uplift.”
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".