Gentrification and changing visual landscapes: a Google Street View analysis of residential upgrading and class aesthetics in Hamilton’s Lower City
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Measuring the pace and spatial distribution of gentrification is important to developing policies to mitigate its negative consequences. Typically, this is done through an analysis of census data on demographic, socioeconomic or housing change. However, this approach has numerous shortcomings, including the homogenizing effect on differences within neighbourhoods and the infrequency of census data collection. Visual analysis, particularly when examining multiple temporal views of the same location, has the potential to render visible fine-grained detail about spatial, economic and cultural changes within the urban landscape. Google Street View (GSV) is emerging as a source of repeat photography data. In this article, we employ a GSV analysis within a number of neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario. Coding and analysing GSV images between 2009 and 2021 reveals an array of specific home upgrades, as well as aesthetic changes that reflect middle-class tastes, values and lifestyles that suggest more upgrading than found within conventional statistics or dominant narratives about the city. Mapping these changes paints a complex, and fine-grained, block-by-block picture of gentrification that reveals why some areas are more conducive to gentrification than others. Our analysis is important for critical visual methodologies, theoretical discussions about gentrification and neighbourhood change theories and debates within planning and policymaking.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".