Tent encampments in Toronto, Canada: Excavating Northern housing informalities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the ambiguities of municipal state regulation in relation to the dwelling practices of Toronto’s unhoused population. This paper argues tent encampments are a persistent mode of urban informality in the global North, where tents and other small structures provide a source of housing, particularly in cities with limited housing options. Using the City of Toronto as a case study, this paper analyzes how urban informality is reproduced and mediated by state policies, protocols, and actors. The findings suggest the local state—at times ambiguous and negotiated relative to an array of actors, property relations, and desirable formalities—routinely clears encampments from public property. The city’s enforcement and regulatory regime often removes tent encampments without rehousing people, thus contributing to cyclical patterns of informal urbanization. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research to better understand the similarities, differences, and nuances of this mode of urban informality in global North cities and to open the regulatory and policy field to options beyond criminalization.
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.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".