Contested densification: Sustainability, place and expectations at the urban fringe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The discourse of sustainability-by-density is dominant in urban policies and climate-friendly urbanism today. Yet, with current failures and disparities in the regulation of dense development and land speculation, the effects of such policies are not exclusively positive. In this article, we address citizen opposition to densification in urban peripheries of the Global North, especially in the North American context, with particular focus on a case at the urban fringe of the Montreal metropolitan area (Canada). We contribute to existing scholarship on a relational approach to urban sustainability with the objective of better understanding the narratives and governance dynamics that unfold in urban peripheries. In the case studied, the gap between residents' subjective experience of the ongoing transformations and the State discourses at different scales is particularly important, yet little understood after several years of public participatory meetings and two lawsuits. We develop the notion of situated expectations to show how actors entertain different expectations of the performance of State and citizen practices in favor of sustainability, which are grounded in their respective relationships to place, scale and the urban boundary. The lack of circulation and mutual recognition between these expectations makes the construction of coalitions and shared participatory governance practices much more problematic.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".