Attracting The Eyes and Capitalizing on The Wallets: The Problem with Toronto’s New Public Performance Space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the official opening of Yonge-Dundas Square last spring, the Toronto theatre and music communities gained a new outdoor performance venue, and the discount ticket seller TO TIX, a permanent home. The space itself is a curious addition to Toronto’s inner-city landscape. It’s a great, big, blank canvas of granite slabs, with a few concrete benches, a skinny canopy structure that is reminiscent of the Gardiner Expressway, and a double row of fountains that light up as the sky darkens. Surrounded as it is by concrete buildings and the honks and exhaust from a steady stream of cars, one might have hoped for a little green space. But one cannot argue that the square seems out of place; the design is urban grey and it blends visually into the urban grey that surrounds it. The granite slabs that line its surface are graphically reminiscent of the outdoor plazas of nearby skyscrapers, and the vertical lines of the pillars rhyme with the varying heights of the surrounding buildings. The square is formally compatible with its surroundings; the question is how well it will function under the hybrid identity assigned to it by the city. The city is marketing Yonge-Dundas Square as a public space, while at the same time encouraging it as a venue for private rental. Introducing twenty-four-hour surveillance, rental fees, and a plethora of advertising billboards charges the space with a political dimension and puts in doubt the idea that this is simply a new gathering space for public entertainments. Yonge-Dundas Square may at first appear as a genuine addition to Toronto’s public space, an exciting new performance venue to be shaped by citizen use, but it is also a commercial venture that aims to free itself from the city’s purse strings in three years’ time. Our role as active spectators obliges us to be conscious of the multiple, and sometimes conflicting, performative elements at play in this new venue.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.044 | 0.005 |
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".