Nullius no more? Valorising vacancy through urban agriculture in the settler-colonial ‘green city’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on research conducted in three North American cities renowned for their commitment to sustainability – Portland, Vancouver, and Montreal – I illustrate how practitioners and entrepreneurial ‘growth machine’ actors alike employ urban agriculture as a means of valorising vacant properties. Municipal officials cash in on the symbolic sustainability capital that gardens provide, while activists cultivate gardens on vacant lots as a means of ‘reclaiming the city’. A growing body of literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism, however, elucidates how the discursive production of vacancy underlying such valorisation efforts reproduces settler-colonial logics of racialised dispossession and effaces existing uses, relations, and sovereignties. Even the most progressive of initiatives, such as commoning, frequently turn on such pernicious logics. Vacancy, in this light, takes on new valence as a vital mechanism of (always ongoing) colonisation, and thus also a lively terrain of (longstanding) contestation.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".