Cemeteries as critical social infrastructure: A comparative legal geography
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Spatial shortages are jeopardizing the sustainability of cemeteries in urban communities, and to date, few studies have looked at this issue from a comparative lens. Examining cemetery law and policy in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, this paper looks at how these jurisdictions are ignoring or addressing this issue and whether there are opportunities for learning. Using the lens of critical social infrastructure and the novel hybrid methodology of comparative legal geography, the research details the legal frameworks concerning cemeteries in order to understand the roots of the issue and examines whether spatial shortages have prompted government intervention. Although both jurisdictions rely on divergent planning approaches and only one, New South Wales, frames cemeteries within the lens of critical social infrastructure, our findings reveal that the provisioning of cemeteries and the costs of interment have made death an equity issue across urban communities. • The urgency to address spatial shortages relates to whether cemeteries are valued as critical infrastructure. • The regulatory relationships established in 19th Century legislation continue to impact cemetery sustainability. • Unaffordability means the scale of the problem spreads and becomes costly for governments both locally and regionally. • Political resistance to change is a clear obstacle for minority faith communities in the establishment of new cemeteries.
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".