More Than Urban Mining: Salvaging Modern Material Discards for Meaningful Reuse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: As redevelopment of already built-up sites expands in North American cities, tearing down large modern buildings is also accelerating. In pursuit of circular economy and sustainable building ideals, traditional practices like deconstruction for salvage and reuse are being revived. However, a shift toward valuing existing buildings as material banks, as implied in the rise of "urban mining," challenges established material heritage values. Attempts to salvage and reuse modern materials and assemblies raise specific issues, notably the perceived obsolescence of industrial materials and modern buildings and the complex and difficult values of hazardous or experimental elements. In some cases, reinventing modern materials with new uses in new places will expand or reframe heritage values while helping us learn how to address their challenges as objects of materials conservation. To evaluate current practices, this paper discusses selected examples from Ottawa's postwar urban landscape, each of which illustrates the range of issues for alternatives to demolition. Specific opportunities for modern heritage include reorienting salvage efforts to the scale of the component and redefining materials reuse as a critique of modernist models of obsolescence and materials waste.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".