Empowerment through design? Housing cooperatives for women in Montreal
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Focusing on the architecture of three co-ops in Montreal established to support women in the 1978–88 period, this article examines the relationship between empowerment and design in the context of gender-conscious cooperative housing. Deindustrialisation from the 1960s was coupled with downtown renewal, which effectively meant many low-income, working-class neighbourhoods were wholesale cleared for new projects. The housing cooperative emerged as a viable model to protect access to housing. Against this backdrop, women in various government and non-profit positions helped each other and other women in precarious housing situations to establish housing co-ops for women. Feminist proponents of permanent and affordable women’s housing argued that housing was central to women’s emancipation, that is, to the designing of ‘non-sexist’ cities. The article treats the built environment of the co-ops as evidence to study if and how residents transformed their surroundings, and complements this with qualitative interviews with former and current residents to understand how the physical environment has, in turn, shaped their lives. While the co-op movement characterises itself as a type of solidarity network with open membership, the quality of architecture, or the deficiency thereof, in a social environment with already scarce resources can lead to tensions among member-residents. However, the historical housing co-ops, as well as ongoing initiatives to establish new women’s co-ops, demonstrate the need and desire to pursue intersectional housing justice via the cooperative model, and the article’s findings point to the need for increased attention to and investment in architectural design.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 it